...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'BrienRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
True peace transcends mere agreements and lasts long after conflict.
This quote highlights the enduring impact of war, suggesting that the repercussions of conflict extend beyond the battlefield and official treaties. Even when formal peace is declared, the emotional and social scars remain through generations, affecting families and communities long after the last gun is fired.
Themes
WarPeaceImpactEmotional ScarsConflict
In practice
Example use cases
During a conference on veterans' issues, this quote can illustrate the long-lasting effects of conflict.
More from Tim O'Brien
All quotes βUnlike 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.
Tim O'BrienRead
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.
Tim O'BrienRead
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.
Tim O'BrienRead
War is a fundamental aspect of human existence. It's good to know what war entails and what the human sacrifice is.
Tim O'BrienRead
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
Similar quotes
This war differs from other wars, in this particular. We are not fighting armies but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war.
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Smell that? You smell that? Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning.
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If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
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Until we go through it ourselves, until our people cower in the shelters of New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere while the buildings collapse overhead and burst into flames, and dead bodies hurtle about and, when it is over for the day or the night, emerge in the rubble to find some of their dear ones mangled, their homes gone, their hospitals, churches, schools demolished - only after that gruesome experience will we realize what we are inflicting on the people of Indochina.
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Trenches, hospitals, the common grave--there are no other possibilities.
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Then somebody suggested I should write about the war, and I said I didn't know anything about the war. I did not understand anything about it. I didn't see how I could write it
Martha GellhornRead