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
A bullet can kill the enemy, but a bullet can also produce an enemy, depending on whom that bullet strikes.
Interpretation
The impact of violence creates complex consequences, shaping relationships and conflicts.
This quote highlights the duality of violence, suggesting that while a bullet may physically eliminate an enemy, it can also be the catalyst for future enmity, depending on the perspective of those involved. It emphasizes that the consequences of actions, especially those involving harm, can lead to unforeseen repercussions that extend beyond the immediate outcome.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the ethics of war and its long-term effects.
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.
Man, as the minister and interpreter of nature, is limited in act and understanding by his observation of the order of nature; neither his understanding nor his power extends further.
The moral of the story is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around.
Man as Atman is really free; as man he is bound, changed by every physical condition.
I'll tell you," said Beatty, smiling at his cards. "That made you for a little while a drunkard. Read a few lines and off you go over the cliff. Bang, you're ready to blow up the world, chop off heads, knock down women and children, destroy authority. I know. I've been through it all.
In every adult there lurks a childβ an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention, and education. That is the part of the personality which wants to develop and become whole.
We try to think with 'and' rather than 'or.' It doesn't have to be healthy or tasty. It can be healthy and tasty. It can be wholesome and convenient.
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