...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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
True peace transcends mere agreements and lasts long after conflict.
This quote highlights the enduring impact of war, suggesting that the repercussions of conflict extend beyond the battlefield and official treaties. Even when formal peace is declared, the emotional and social scars remain through generations, affecting families and communities long after the last gun is fired.
Themes
WarPeaceImpactEmotional ScarsConflict
In practice
Example use cases
During a conference on veterans' issues, this quote can illustrate the long-lasting effects of conflict.
More from Tim O'Brien
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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.
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It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.
Tim O'BrienRead
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I know that war is very cruel and that life is harder when you aren't able to live in the place you called home.
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Like some infernal monster, still venomous in death, a war can go on killing people for a long time after itβs all over.
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I pray for no more youth To perish before its prime; That Revenge and iron-heated War May fade with all that has gone before Into the night of time.
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These are they whose youth was violently severed by war and death; a word on the telephone, a scribbled line on paper, and their future ceased. They have built up their lives again, but their safety is not absolute, their fortress not impregnable.
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If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
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