I detested their blind, thoughtless, automatic acquiescence to it all, their simpleminded patriotism, their prideful ignorance, their love-it-or-leave-it platitudes, how they were sending me off to a war they didn't understand and didn't want to understand. I held them responsible. By God, yes, I did. All of them - I held them personally and individually responsible - the polyestered Kiwanis boys, the merchants and the farmers, the pious churchgoers, the chatty housewives, the PTA and the Lions club and the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the fine outstanding gentry out at the country club. They didn't know Bao Dai from the man in the moon. They didn't know history. They didn't know the first thing about Diem's tyranny, or the nature of Vietnamese nationalist, or the long colonialism of the French - this was all too damn complicated, it required some reading - but no matter, it was a war to stop the Communists, plain and simple, which was how they liked things, and you were a treasonous pussy if you had second thoughts about killing or dying for plain and simple reasons. . Tim OBrien
There was a clatter as the basilisk fangs cascaded out of Hermione's arms. Running at Ron, she flung them around his neck and kissed him full on the mouth. Ron threw away the fangs and broomstick he was holding and responded with such enthusiasm that...
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J.k. Rowling
They're in love. Fuck the war.
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Thomas Pynchon
If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: in love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.
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Kristin Hannah
And when all the wars are over, a butterfly will still be beautiful.
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Ruskin Bond
The words ‘I Love You’ kill, and resurrect millions, in less than a second.
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Aberjhani
More Quotes By Tim OBrien
That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.
A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.
In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap...
It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid. When you’re afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay...
The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.
