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
A true war story is never moral.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The essence of a true war story lies in its authenticity rather than moral lessons.
Tim O'Brien's quote, 'A true war story is never moral,' suggests that the complexities of war often do not lend themselves to clear moral outcomes. Instead, real war stories tend to capture the raw, chaotic experiences of those who lived through them, highlighting the uncertainties and contradictions inherent in warfare rather than offering simple lessons about good and evil.
Themes
WarTruthStorytellingMoralityExperience
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the complexities of veterans' stories during a conference.
More from Tim O'Brien
All quotes β...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.
Tim O'BrienRead
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.
Tim O'BrienRead
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.
Tim O'BrienRead
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.
Tim O'BrienRead
War is a fundamental aspect of human existence. It's good to know what war entails and what the human sacrifice is.
Tim O'BrienRead
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War's dirty little secret is that some men love it.
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Smell that? You smell that? Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning.
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We come across thirty or so hurried graves with makeshift wooden markers. 'Private Edwards, E.', a number, and that was all. Fourteen days ago he was alive, thinking feeling, hoping... If war was a game of cards, I'd say someone was cheating.
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So many nurses had turned into emotionally disturbed handmaidens of the war, in their yellow-and-crimson uniforms with bone buttons.
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He once told Allie and I that if he'd had to shoot anybody, he wouldn't've known which direction to shoot in. He said the Army was practically as full of bastards as the Nazis were.
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This war differs from other wars, in this particular. We are not fighting armies but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.
William Tecumseh ShermanRead