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
Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you.
Interpretation
Stories allow us to deeply empathize with others, offering experiences that factual accounts often cannot convey.
In this quote, Tim O'Brien emphasizes the power of storytelling to foster empathy and connection with characters' experiences, particularly in challenging situations like war. Unlike documentaries or nonfiction, which present facts and information, stories immerse us in the emotional landscapes of individuals, allowing us to truly understand their thoughts, feelings, and struggles.
In practice
In a book club discussion about war literature, one could use this quote to highlight the immersive power of story.
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.
I'd like to be remembered as a premier singer of songs, not just a popular act of a given period.
When you write a play, you work out like a musician on a piece of music. You find all the rhythms and the melody and the harmonies and take them as they come.
A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.
In art there is only one thing that counts: the bit that cannot be explained.
Writing a new play shouldn't be seen as a mystery belonging to a priesthood, but as a challenge, a technical challenge, just to get into it.
A person who's only suffering can't write a poem. There are choices to be made, and you need to be objective.
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