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
We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it and guard it and hold it forever inaccessible.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects our deep curiosity about the inner lives of others and our desire to understand what is often hidden.
Tim O'Brien expresses the universal human fascination with the experiences and inner thoughts of others, which seem to remain forever distant and elusive. He highlights our efforts to break through the barriers that separate us from understanding one another fully, whether through imagination, dreams, or scientific inquiry, acknowledging that these walls can make the human spirit seem permanently inaccessible.
Themes
Human SpiritUnderstandingOthernessCuriosityBarriers
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a discussion about interpersonal relationships to emphasize the challenge of truly knowing another person.
More from Tim O'Brien
All quotes →...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
Similar quotes
Things that happen every day are, frankly, what we in the news business aren't good at covering because there is no one day in which they are news.
Nicholas KristofRead
The life-converting experience is not the discovery that I have choices to make that determine the way I live out my existence, but the awareness that my that my existence itself is not in the center. Once I 'know' God, that is, once I experience God's love as the love in which all my human experiences are anchored, I can desire only one thing: to be in that love.
Henri NouwenRead
The social intuitionist model offers an explanation of why moral and political arguments are so frustrating: because moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. A dog’s tail wags to communicate. You can’t make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail. And you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments.
Jonathan HaidtRead
What is the answer? In that case, what is the question?
Gertrude SteinRead
Isn't it too bad that the great truths are all such lies.
Stephen KingRead
Let him that is without stone among you cast the first thing he can lay his hands on.
Robert FrostRead