The wars don't end when you sign peace treaties or when the years go by. They will echo on until I'm gone and all the widows and orphans are gone.
Tim O'BrienRead
Laughter does not deny pain. Laughter - like a wail - acknowledges and replies to pain.
Interpretation
Laughter accepts the existence of pain rather than ignoring it.
This quote suggests that laughter is a genuine response to pain, similar to a wail. It emphasizes that laughter does not dismiss suffering; instead, it recognizes and confronts it, highlighting the complex relationship between joy and sorrow in the human experience.
In practice
During a speech at a mental health awareness event, one could use this quote to illustrate the importance of recognizing emotions.
The wars don't end when you sign peace treaties or when the years go by. They will echo on until I'm gone and all the widows and orphans are gone.
...you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.
Unlike Chicago or New York, small-town Minnesota did not allow a man's failings to disappear beneath a veil of numbers. People talked. Secrets did not stay secret.
Place is so important to me. The Midwest is like a ghost in my life. It's present as I look out the window now. I see Texas, but if I close my eyes and look out the same window, I'm back in my hometown in Worthington, Minnesota, and I cherish those values and that diction.
In fiction workshops, we tend to focus on matters of verisimilitude largely because such issues are so much easier to talk about than the failure of imagination.
War is a fundamental aspect of human existence. It's good to know what war entails and what the human sacrifice is.
In the person with autism, the brain may already be seeing the part and be less distracted by the whole, and in the person without autism the brain may have to set aside its picture of the whole to analyze the detail.
Nothing becomes so offensive so quickly as grief. When fresh it finds someone to console it, but when it becomes chronic, it is ridiculed and rightly.
One does one's thinking before one knows what one is to think about.
All the forces that we see in nature, such as gravitation, attraction, and repulsion, or as thought, feeling, and nervous motion - all these various forces resolve into that Prana, and the vibration of the Prana ceases. In that state it remains until the beginning of the next cycle. Prana then begins to vibrate, and that vibration acts upon the Akasha, and all these forms are thrown out in regular succession.
We always strive after what is forbidden, and desire the things refused us.
An opponent is entitled to the same regard for his principles as we would expect others to have for ours. Non-violence demands that we should see every opportunity to win over opponents.
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