Going After Cacciato Quotes

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

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

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

“For just as happiness is more than the absence of sadness, so peace is infinitely more than the absence of war.”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“You have taken many risks. You have been brave beyond your wildest expectations. And now it is time for a final act of courage. I urge you: March proudly into your own dream.”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“Peace of mind is not a simple matter of pursuing one’s own pleasure; rather, it is inextricably linked to the attitudes of other human beings, to what they want, to what they expect.”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

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

“Large effects might come from small causes.”
― Tim O'Brien, 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, Going After Cacciato

“What we have here,” Doc said at the start of the fourth week of the peace, “is your basic vacuum. Follow me? A vacuum. Like in emptiness, suction. Can’t have order in a vacuum. For order you got to have substance, matériel. So here we are—nothing to order, no substance. Aimless, that’s”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“So you see,” said Li Van Hgoc as he brought down the periscope and locked it with a silver key, “things may be viewed from many angles. From down below, or from inside out, you often discover entirely new understandings.”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“Each soldier, he has a different war. Even if it is the same war, it is a different war. Do you see this?”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“There should be a law: If you support a war, you must go. And your children must go. Otherwise you’re a hypocrite and will be imprisoned for murderous hypocrisy.”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“War stories. That was what remained: a few stupid war stories, hackneyed and unprofound. Even the lessons were commonplace. It hurts to be shot. Dead men are heavy. Don't seek trouble, it'll find you soon enough. You hear the shot that gets you. Scared to death on the field of battle. Life after death. These were hard lessons, true, but they were lessons of ignorance; ignorant men, trite truths. What remained was simple event. The facts, the physical things. A war like any war. No new messages. Stories that began and ended without transition. No developing drama or tension or direction. No order.”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“But the lieutenant knew that in war purpose is never paramount, neither purpose nor cause, and that battles are always fought among human beings, not purposes. He could not imagine dying for a purpose. Death was its own purpose, no qualification or restraint. He did not celebrate war. He did not believe in glory.”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“If inner peace is the true objective, would I win it in exile?”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“His brain had the bends.”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato