"... the thing about remembering is that you don't forget.”
“Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those
late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where
you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is
erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”
“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 explodes, you close your eyes and duck and
float outside yourself. .. The pictures get jumbled, you tend to miss a
lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always
that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which
in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.”
“And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's
about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a
river when you know you must cross the river and march into the
mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and
memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and
people who never listen.”
“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.”
―
all quotes from Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
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