Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I hated the draft, but at the same time, it's something that made every American take war seriously.
It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.
...precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated.
That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.
I grew up with the Gene Kelly look at war. The cheerful kind of stories you tell about a horrendous war.
I carry the memories of the ghosts of a place called Vietnam - the people of Vietnam, my fellow soldiers.
But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.
A bullet can kill the enemy, but a bullet can also produce an enemy, depending on whom that bullet strikes.
I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.
We tend to regard history as true and 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' as untrue. That's always puzzled me.
I'm not dead. But when I am, it's likeI don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading.
In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.
It's one thing to say you're for the war; it's another thing to send your kid to war - your daughter or your son.
By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths.
War is a fundamental aspect of human existence. It's good to know what war entails and what the human sacrifice is.
Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones - THAT kind of love.
To be memorable and to have dramatic impact, informational detail must function actively within the dynamic of a story.
They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.
With no draft, the only people who went to war were those who wanted to, or at least those who wanted to join the military.
Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.
I guess we're really brothers, aren't we? Don't know what that means, except it means that some of the same things we remember.
...his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered.
Most of the things in 'The Things They Carried' didn't happen to me. Ninety-five percent of it's invented. It's not what occurred.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, our soldiers signed up intentionally. That's a huge difference from the largely conscripted army of my era.
My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead.
There is always the threat of tomorrow's treachery, or next year's treachery, or the treachery implicit in all the tomorrows beyond that.
I showed up in October 1946, part of an early surge that would become a great nationwide baby boom. My sister Kathy was born a year later.
At the bottom, all wars are the same because they involve death and maiming and wounding, and grieving mothers, fathers, sons and daughters.
I received my draft notice right after graduation from college and had three months before going into the Army in September to think about it.
Fantasy has a dark side to it. It also has a light hemisphere - the power of the human imagination to keep going, to imagine a better tomorrow.
In a war without aim, you tend not to aim. You close your eyes, close your heart. The consequences become hit or miss in the most literal sense.
I'll picture Rat Kiley face, his grief, and I'll think, You dumb cooze. Because she wasn't listening. It wasn't a war story. It was a love story.
There's something about being amid the chaos and the horror of a war that makes you appreciate all you don't have - and all you may lose forever.
I returned to Vietnam in '94, and even then, all those decades later, walking around that place, I remained afraid. And, in some ways, rightly so.
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.
... when he kissed her, she received the kiss without returning it, her eyes wide open, not afraid, not a virgin's eyes, just flat and uninvolved.
I know what it is to feel unloved, to want revenge, to make mistakes, to suffer disappointment, yet also to find the courage to go forward in life.
It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite; he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.
Each of us, I suppose needs his illusions. Life after death. A maker of planets. A woman to love, a man to hate. Something sacred. But what a waste.
A writer's obligation is to invent: to go beyond what did happen and to look at what could have happened but didn't. Fiction writers are born liars.
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.
Why do fairy tales exist, and why do movies exist? Why do novels exist? There has to be a reason for it; otherwise, none of these things would be there.
Sure, best seller. I'd love to knock Stephen King off the top of the list. I know I won't, but, after all, I spend my life inventing a different reality.
Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it's not science, it's an exploration, but you never find much in the way of answers.
Stories are not explanations of the world we live in. Science does that, and math does that. Our obligation as fiction writers is to enhance the mysteries.
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.
He had an opinion of himself, I think, that was too high for his own good. Or maybe it was the reverse. Maybe it was a low opinion that he kept trying to erase.
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.
In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true.
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.