"I remember opening the letter, scanning the first few lines, feeling the blood go thick behind my eyes. I remember a sound in my head. It wasnt thinking, just a silent howl. A million things all at once — I was too good for this war. Too smart, too compassionate, too everything. It couldnt happen. I was above it."
Tim O'Brien is an American novelist who served as a soldier in the Vietnam War. Much of his writing is about wartime Vietnam, and his work later in life often explores the postwar lives of its veterans.
"At night, when I couldnt sleep, Id sometimes carry on silent arguments with those people. Id be screaming at them, telling them how much I detested their blind, thoughtless, automatic acquiescence to it all, their simpleminded patriotism, their prideful ignorance, their love-it-or-leave it platitudes, how they were sending me off to fight a war they didnt understand and didnt want to understand."
"They carried the soldiers greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to."
"A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but its a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, "The fuck you do that for?" and the jumper says, "Story of my life, man" and other guys start to smile but hes dead. Thats a true story that never happened."
"Well, I still dont get it, she said. The way you talk, it sounds calculating or something. Too cold. Planning every tiny detail. And thats bad? No. Not exactly. What then? She made a shifting motion with her shoulders. I dont know, it just seem strange, sort of. How youve figured everything out, all the angles, except what its for. For us, he said. I love you, Kath. But it feels — I shouldnt say this — it feels manipulating.... He talked about leading a good life, doing good things for the world. Yet even as he spoke, John realized he was not telling the full truth. Politics was manipulation. (p. 35)"
"I feel the poet does write on memory but... Wasnt it Aristotle who said the historian keeps the factual record of mankind and the poet writes the emotional history of mankind? I think you can read a history of Vietnam and know that so many men under the age of twenty were killed, or you can read Tim OBrien and you can "feel" those deaths. OBrien is preserving the emotional history of Vietnam. A historian is preserving the facts."
"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 cant fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you cant make them undead."
"yes is a pleasant country... love is a deeper season than reason"
E. E. Cummings"true lovers in each happening of their hearts live longer than all which and every who"
E. E. Cummings"What concerns me fundamentaly is a meteoric burlesk melodrama, born of the immemorial adage love will find a way."
E. E. Cummings"I am dominated by one thing, an irresistible, burning attraction towards the abstract. The expression of human feelings and the passions of man certainly interest me deeply, but I am less concerned with expressing the motions of the soul and mind than to render visible, so to speak, the inner flashes of intuition which have something divine in their apparent insignificance and reveal magic, even divine horizons, when they are transposed into the marvellous effects of pure plastic art."
Gustave Moreau"and liars kill their kind but her,my love creates love only our"
E. E. Cummings"The anxiety to be admired is a loveless passion ... , loud on the hustings, gay in the ball-room, mute and sullen at the family fireside."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge