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
The word war itself has a kind of glazing abstraction to it that conjures up bombs and bullets and so on, whereas my goal is to try to, so much as I can, capture the heart and the stomach and the back of the throat of readers who can lie in bed at night and participate in a story.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the importance of storytelling in conveying the emotional truths of war beyond its physical violence.
Tim O'Brien reflects on the notion that the term 'war' often reduces complex human experiences to mere images of violence and destruction. His aspiration is to engage readers on a deeper emotional level, allowing them to intimately connect with the fundamental feelings and stories of those affected by war, moving them away from cold abstractions of conflict to a more immersive and human understanding.
Themes
WarStorytellingEmotionHuman ExperienceLiterature
In practice
Example use cases
A writer might use this quote to inspire fellow authors on the importance of emotional depth in writing.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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