Quote of the Week: Tim O'Brien

Cut for spoilers, sort of. This is the final passage of The Things They Carried and while it doesn't reveal any particular plot points it's still a very poignant final image. If you haven't read this book (please do), be aware that reading this post is like reading the last page and that you'll be getting O'Brien's final thoughts first. I hazard against it.

The Infinitely Quotable

I've had this strange habit all my life of writing down the things that people say. I have three ring binders full of quotes from movies, songs, and books. There are pages in those binders full of quotes from family vacations and parties. There are even some pages in the Mall of America FranklinCovey store planner filled with strange things customers have said. It's always just been a compulsion of mine to keep track of things that touch me, inspire me, or make me laugh. My binders are somewhere in my parents' garage but I do have a number of books here (of course) and the delightful internet at my fingertips, so here are a few of my favorite quotes:

"To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch...to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!" -Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Always do right. That will gratify some of the people and astonish the rest." -Mark Twain

"The human race has one really effective weapon and that is laughter. Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand." -Mark Twain

"A person with a new idea is a crank until that idea succeeds." -Mark Twain

"Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured." -Mark Twain

"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first." -Mark Twain

"A cauliflower is just a cabbage with a college education." -Mark Twain

"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." -The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

"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." -The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

"I'll never be certain, of course, but I think he meant to bring me up against the realities, to guide me across the river and to take me to the edge and to stand a kind of vigil as I chose a life for myself." -The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

"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." -The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

"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 Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

"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." -The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

"All fire burns, little baby. You'll learn." -Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

"'Good luck,' whispered the Angel Islington. There was a rushing sound like a wind soughing across a lost forest, or the beating of mighty wings." -Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

"Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment is as slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting. Why has he gone where I cannot follow?" -The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

"Sometimes he would rock her to sleep in his arms, and read her left to right, and know everything he needed to know about the world. If it wasn't written on her, it wasn't important to him." -Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

"He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad." -Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

"Love itself became the object of her love. She loved herself in love, she loved loving love, as love loves loving, and was able, in that way, to reconcile herself with a world that fell so short of what she would have hoped for." -Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

"She felt a total displacement, like a spinning globe brought to a sudden halt by the light touch of a finger. How did she end up here, like this? How could there have been so much--so many moments, so many people and things, so many razors and pillows, timepieces and subtle coffins--without her being aware? How did her life live itself without her?" -Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

"He knew that I love you also means I love you more than anyone loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that no one loves you, or has loved you, or will love you, and also, I love you in a way that I love no one else, and never have loved anyone else, and never will love anyone else." -Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

"God loves the plagiarist. And so it is written, 'God created humankind in His image, in the image of God He created them.' God is the original plagiarizer. With a lack of reasonable sources from which to filch--man created in the image of what? the animals?--the creation of man was an act of reflexive plagiarizing; God looted the mirror." -Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

"Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody." -Mark Twain

"After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her." -"The Diary of Adam" by Mark Twain

"Wherever she was, there was Eden." -"The Diary of Adam" by Mark Twain

Stories Are for Those Late Hours in the Night

My favorite scary book is The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. I first read it after Mr. Gaiman was generous enough to donate an autographed copy to a benefit that I was organizing (no, I didn't read the autographed one--I bought the ebook on my Nook). It's a Newbery medal-winning retelling of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book set in a graveyard and it is incredible. When you first encounter the man Jack and his dripping blade in the beginning, you know you're in for a creepy treat. In true Gaiman style, the fear is broken up by well-timed (and clever) laughs but it's never far off. Nobody Owens is a wonderful hero and just how I imagine a cemetery Mowgli would be. For a spine-tingling Halloween, I highly recommend The Graveyard Book.

Stories are meant to transport us from our real lives. If we are willing and the story is strong enough, for a few hundred pages we are elsewhere, being somebody else, doing something more interesting than what we're stuck with day-to-day. It's truly a beautiful thing, the interaction between a book and its reader. If it weren't for stories, many of us would be leading "lives of quiet desperation" without knowing what to call them. In one of my favorite books, The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien explores the qualities of truth, war, and writing. (I also noticed, when looking for the link, that there's a CliffsNotes and a SparkNotes version of this book. I feel sick. O'Brien is a truly masterful writer and I can't imagine really understanding TTTC without his language. That's a topic for another day, though.)

I especially enjoy the concept of story-truth that O'Brien introduces in this novel. In stories, the important factor is not factual truth but the feelings of the situation. A successful storytelling makes the reader or listener feel the emotions of the characters or the situation. O'Brien's argument is that it is story-truth that is important and it is through stories that we can start to understand life and to understand ourselves. He writes, "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." We can achieve these things through telling a story the way it's meant to be told, with an emotional truth that the facts can't cloud over or line up into neat columns.

And to bring things full-circle, it's story-truth that makes scary stories so frightening. The villain may be a ghost or a member of a murderous secret society or a man possessed by the rage of a hotel or some one or thing equally as unlikely. And yet there's something sinister, emotionally crippled, cold, calculating, and ultimately distressingly familiar about this character that tells you: I am. Maybe not in this particular form, but I exist. You've seen me on television, in the eyes of people on the street, and you fear me. If there wasn't a familiar quality in Jack Torrance, Elspeth Noblin, or the man Jack (a little shout-out to the two of you who responded last time!), we wouldn't be afraid because we simply wouldn't be able to suspend our disbelief.


Bridget

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"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."

-The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien