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
you're never more alive than when you're almost dead.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that life is most profoundly felt when faced with danger or the brink of death.
Tim O'Brien's quote reflects on the concept that extreme situations, particularly those involving life and death, can heighten oneβs awareness and appreciation of living. In facing mortality, individuals may experience an intense clarity and vividness in their perceptions, making them feel truly alive in a way that everyday experiences may not provide.
In practice
Using this quote in a motivational speech about overcoming challenges.
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.
Every time I close my eyes blowing that trumpet of mine, I look right into the heart of good old New Orleans. It has given me something to live for.
Living the past is a dull and lonely business; looking back strains the neck muscles, causing you to bump into people not going your way.
At my age, and in my circumstances, what sinister object, or personal emolument had I to seek after, in this life? The growing infirmities of age and the increasing love of retirement, daily confirm my decided predilection for domestic life: and the great Searcher of human hearts is my witness, that I have no wish, which aspires beyond the humble and happy lot of living and dying a private citizen on my own farm.
You've been put on the world to love the act of being alive.
I was bullied as a boy - lots of kids are, but hopefully most of us get on with our lives and grow up.
When a woman conceives her true self, a miracle occurs and life around her begins again.
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