Quotes from Going After Cacciato

“Imagination, like reality, has its limits.”
― Tim O'Brien, quote from Going After Cacciato

“It is easy, of course, to fear happiness. There is often complacency in the acceptance of misery. We fear parting from our familiar roles. We fear the consequences of such a parting. We fear happiness because we fear failure. But we must overcome these fears. We must be brave. It is one thing to speculate about what might be. It is quite another to act in behalf of our dreams, to treat them as objectives that are achievable and worth achieving. It is one thing to run from unhappiness; it is another to take action to realize those qualities of dignity and well-being that are the true standards of the human spirit.”
― Tim O'Brien, quote from Going After Cacciato

“A miracle to confound natural law, a baffling reversal of the inevitable consequences . . . a miracle. . . . An act of high imagination -- daring and lurid and impossible. Yes, a cartoon of the mind.”
― Tim O'Brien, quote from Going After Cacciato

“What happened, and what might have happened?”
― Tim O'Brien, quote from Going After Cacciato

“Peace never bragged. If you didn't look for it, it wasn't there.”
― Tim O'Brien, quote from Going After Cacciato

“And now it is time for a final act of courage. I urge you: March proudly into your own dream.”
― Tim O'Brien, quote from Going After Cacciato

“He showed me how...See, he says he's going up through Laos, then into Burma, and then some other country, I forget, and then India and Iran and Turkey, and then Greece, and the rest is easy. That's what he said. The rest is easy, he said.”
― Tim O'Brien, quote from Going After Cacciato

“He thought about the difference between good times and bad times, and how funny it was that he could not state the difference, only feel it.”
― Tim O'Brien, quote from Going After Cacciato

“In battle, in a war, a soldier sees only a tiny fragment of what is available to be seen. The soldier is not a photographic machine. He is not a camera. He registers, so to speak, only those few items that he is predisposed to register and not a single thing more. Do you understand this? So I am saying to you that after a battle each soldier will have different stories to tell, vastly different stories, and that when a was is ended it is as if there have been a million wars, or as many wars as there were soldiers.”
― Tim O'Brien, quote from Going After Cacciato

“A few names were known in full, some in part, some not at all. No one cared. Except in clearly unreasonable cases, a soldier was generally called by the name he preferred, or by what he called himself, and no great effort was made to disentangle Christian names from surnames from nicknames.”
― Tim O'Brien, quote from Going After Cacciato

“He believed in mission. But . . . he did not believe in it as an intellectual imperative, or even as a professional standard. Mission . . . was an abstract notion that took meaning in concrete situations.”
― Tim O'Brien, quote from Going After Cacciato

“Money was never a problem, passports were never required. There were always new places to dance.”
― Tim O'Brien, quote from Going After Cacciato

“Yes,” she said, “television is one of those unique products of the American genius. A means of keeping a complex country intact. Just as America begins to explode every which way, riches and opportunity and complexity, just then along comes the TV to bring it all together. Rich and poor, black and white—they share the same heroes, Matt Dillon and Paladin. In January the talk is of Superbowl. In October, baseball. Say what you will, but only Americans could so skillfully build instant bridges among the classes, bind together diversity.”
― Tim O'Brien, quote from Going After Cacciato

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Popular quotes

“I didn’t know if we were heading for the gallows or an interrogation chamber. The night had passed without sleep; save for a swig from the German’s flask, there hadn’t been a sip to drink since the rooftop of the Kirov; a lump the size of an infant’s fist had swelled where my forehead had cracked the ceiling- it was a bad morning, really; among my worst- but I wanted to live.”
― David Benioff, quote from City of Thieves

“Then again, maybe you couldn't have killed me," he said, crawling out of the stairway. He moved very slowly, like a lizard who had gotten too cold.

I heard a whimper from behind one of the closed doors next to the bathroom, and sympathized. I wanted to whimper, too.

"I'm not hunting you," I told him firmly, though I stepped backward until I stood in a circle of light at the end of the hallway.

He stopped halfway out of the stairway, his eyes were filmed over like a dead man's.

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And he was gone, withdrawing from the hallway and down the stairs so fast that I barely caught the motion, though I was staring right at him.

I walked out of his home because if I'd moved any faster, I'd have run screaming.”
― Patricia Briggs, quote from Blood Bound

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― Ally Carter, quote from Only the Good Spy Young

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― Julie Kagawa, quote from The Iron Knight

“I must admit that I haven't heard of the Duchess of Erat before."
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"She's a great beauty," the man said admiringly.
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"I noticed that," the guard said.
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― David Eddings, quote from Pawn of Prophecy

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