The Things They Carried Quotes

“Everything talks. The trees talk politics, the monkeys talk religion.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“He was just a kid at war, in love.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“They were afraid of dying but they were even more afraid to show it.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“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'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Looking back after twenty years, I sometimes wonder if the events of that summer didn't happen in some other dimension, a place where your life exists before you've lived it, and where it goes afterward.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Then he shrugged and gave me a stare that lasted all day.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Sometimes I forgive myself, other times I don't.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Sometimes the bravest thing on earth was to sit through the night and feel the cold in your bones.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“I stood with my arms folded, feeling the grip of sentiment and time.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“The human life is all one thing, like a blade tracing loops on ice: a little kids, a twenty-three-year-old infantry sergeant, a middle-aged writer knowing guilt and sorrow.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Inside the body, or beyond the body, there is something absolute and unchanging.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Once you're alive", she'd say, "you can't ever be dead.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth; if you don’t care for the truth, watch how you vote.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“I keep trying to find a way to tell this story, to explain how things went bad”
― Tim O'Brien, Tim O'Brien: The Things They Carried (Paperback); 2009 Edition

“and the war was entirely a matter of posture and carriage, the hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility. Their principles were in their feet. Their calculations were biological.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“They carried the land itself—Vietnam, the place, the soil—a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity. They moved like mules.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“They were tough. They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing—these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“A true war story is never moral.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“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.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“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.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“What stories can do, I guess, is make things present. I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“In a way, maybe, I’d gone under with Kiowa, and now after two decades I’d finally worked my way out. A hot afternoon, a bright August sun, and the war was over.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct. They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds. They carried the land itself—Vietnam, the place, the soil—a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried