“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
Tim O'Brien
Born place: in Minnesota, The United States
Born date October 1, 1946
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“You're safe with me, Mira. And I'm safe with you."
He kissed her again to prove it. And when the clock struck one - that lone, ominous tone hovering in the dark - they were still kissing. Her razor blade had snagged his shirt and nicked his chest, and they'd ended up lying in the grass, hidden inside a shadow, ignoring their names whenever someone called them. He traced her mouth again and again, like he still couldn't believe it was real.
There would always be a part of him she couldn't know. A secret place where his heartbreak was stored, where lost innocence and regret filled the air like smoke. She had no desire to open that door ... but she didn't know if that would change one day. If the key would tempt her, if a fairy would manipulate her or she would just be curious. But she had to believe she could be strong enough to resist. That what she wanted - what they both wanted - mattered more than the path that had been laid out for them.
She let her hand slip under his shirt to touch the heart mark on his back, and he brought her other hand to his lips, and kissed every finger he'd entrusted with the key. He was so much more than his curse, and she was so much more than the girl who could betray him.
Together ... they could be anything.”
― quote from Kill Me Softly
“The best part is that you can use any number of different interfaces." Tap, tap, drag. "This one's made of Lego blocks, for younger kids. See how there's a Lego representation of the DNA?”
― Michael Grant, quote from Eve & Adam
“Not sure if this was an angle Glade would want to use – ‘NEW Gas scented plug-ins for all your zombie stench needs. Is Grandma’s rotting corpse beginning to embarrass you? Do guests avoid coming to your house because of the decomposing children? Whisk away those horrible odors with our new GAS plug-ins, now available in Diesel and Oil”
― Mark Tufo, quote from A Plague Upon Your Family
“As if perhaps joy is acceptable for rare moments on the weekend or surprising glimpses of sunsets while on vacation, but it has no real purpose in the real world.”
― Jon Acuff, quote from Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average and Do Work that Matters
“The creative act of the artist lifts him above himself by demanding full surrender. No one puts words on paper or paint on canvas, doubting. If one doubts, one does so five minutes later...”
― Czesław Miłosz, quote from Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition
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The Fairy-Tale Detec...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
