To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil–everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self–your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, 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 OBrien
About This Quote

This poem, by John Keats, was written in 1817. The title comes from the first line of the poem, which says "Beauty is truth, truth beauty". This is a reminder that there are two sides to every story; one side of the story is good and the other side is bad. We must not generalize about war because there are always two sides to any story.

Source: The Things They Carried

Some Similar Quotes
  1. War is what happens when language fails. - Margaret Atwood
  2. Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. - Ernest Hemingway
  3. The world is full enough of hurts and mischances without wars to multiply them. - J.r.r. Tolkien
  4. If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war. - Leo Tolstoy
  5. Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows. - Anonymous
More Quotes By Tim OBrien
  1. That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.
  2. A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.
  3. 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...
  4. 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...
  5. 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.
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