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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
In small towns, people's flaws and secrets are common knowledge, as communities are often closely-knit.
Tim O'Brien's quote reflects on the intimate nature of small-town life, where the actions and failings of individuals are not easily hidden or forgotten. Unlike larger cities, where anonymity can shield one's imperfections, smaller communities foster a culture of openness and conversation, making it difficult for secrets to remain hidden as everyone is interconnected and aware of one another's lives.
Themes
Small TownSecretsRelationshipsCommunityFailings
In practice
Example use cases
In a community meeting discussing transparency, this quote could illustrate the importance of trust.
More from Tim O'Brien
All quotes β...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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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.
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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.
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War is a fundamental aspect of human existence. It's good to know what war entails and what the human sacrifice is.
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It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. 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 can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.
Tim O'BrienRead
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