When your afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world.

Tim O'Brien

Mots clés philosophy-of-death

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Why do our politicians put warnings on cigarette packs and not on their own foreheads?

Tim O'Brien

Mots clés the-nuclear-age

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Zapped while zipping.

Tim O'Brien

Mots clés sadness

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You're a shadow. You slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted or believed in.

Tim O'Brien

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To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil—everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self—your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, 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'Brien

Mots clés war

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Sert bir dil kullanırlardı o korkunç yumuşaklığı kapsayabilmek için. Nallandı derlerdi. Göçtü, işerken şişlendi. Acımasızlık değildi, sahne duruşuydu sadece. Oyuncuydular. Biri öldüğünde tam ölmek gibi değildi, çünkü tuhaf bir biçimde senaryo gereğiydi ve repliklerini ezbere biliyorlardı sanki, ironi katılmış trajedi. Ve bu yüzden farklı adlar yakıştırmayı severlerdi, ölüm gerçeğini parçalamak için. Cesetleri tekmelerlerdi. Baş parmakları keserlerdi. Homurtulu bir argoyla konuşurlardı.

Tim O'Brien

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All of us, I suppose, like to believe that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth, bravely and forthrightly, without thought of personal loss or discredit. Certainly that was my conviction back in the summer of 1968. Tim O'Brien: a secret hero. The Lone Ranger. If the stakes ever became high enough—if the evil were evil enough, if the good were good enough—I would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage that had been accumulating inside me over the years. Courage, I seemed to think, comes to us in finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be drawn down. It was a comforting theory. It dispensed with all those bothersome little acts of daily courage; it offered hope and grace to the repetitive coward; it justified the past while amortizing the future.

Tim O'Brien

Mots clés courage cowardice

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The greater a man's fear, the greater his potential courage

Tim O'Brien

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There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

Tim O'Brien

Mots clés war vietnam

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What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.

I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.

Tim O'Brien

Mots clés writing stories fiction

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