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
you're never more alive than when you're almost dead.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that life is most profoundly felt when faced with danger or the brink of death.
Tim O'Brien's quote reflects on the concept that extreme situations, particularly those involving life and death, can heighten oneβs awareness and appreciation of living. In facing mortality, individuals may experience an intense clarity and vividness in their perceptions, making them feel truly alive in a way that everyday experiences may not provide.
Themes
LifeMortalityAwarenessDangerExistence
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote in a motivational speech about overcoming challenges.
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.
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.
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
Similar quotes
But life is just a party, and parties weren't meant to last.
PrinceRead
As long as we don't die, this is gonna be one hell of a story.
John GreenRead
I'll die young, but it's like kissing God.
Lenny BruceRead
In deference to such spectacular carnage it is perhaps perverse to dwell upon one person's death, but we are creatures so constituted that the passing of one friend or one acquaintance has a profounder effect that that of 100,000 strangers. If there is any metaphorical truth in the Jewish proverb that he who saves one life saves the whole world, then there is equal metaphorical truth in the proposition that when one person dies, the whole world dies with them.
Louis De BernieresRead
If you don't design your own life plan, chances are you'll fall into someone else's plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.
Jim RohnRead
Our being is subject to all the chances of life. There are so many things we are capable of, that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never, any of us, are more than one-fourth fulfilled.
Katherine Anne PorterRead