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classicbooks101 · 9 hours
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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, Tim O'Brien
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classicbooks101 · 9 hours
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I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth. Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.
The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien
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classicbooks101 · 9 hours
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Sometimes the bravest thing on earth was to sit through the night and feel the cold in your bones.
The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien
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classicbooks101 · 1 month
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Proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life.
The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien
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classicbooks101 · 1 month
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Though it's odd, you're never more alive than when you're almost dead. You recognize what's valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what's best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.
The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien
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classicbooks101 · 1 month
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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, Tim O'Brien
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classicbooks101 · 1 month
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Trust your own story. Get the hell out of the way and let it tell itself.
The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien
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classicbooks101 · 2 months
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What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end.
The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien
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classicbooks101 · 2 months
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They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.
The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien
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classicbooks101 · 5 months
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I finally understand why people get tattoos of those they have lost. The need to proclaim not merely the loss but the love, the continuity. I am my father's daughter. It is an act of resistance and refusal: grief telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present.
Notes on Grief, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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classicbooks101 · 5 months
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Does love bring, even if unconsciously, the delusional arrogance of expecting never to be touched by grief?
Notes on Grief, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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classicbooks101 · 5 months
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"Never" has come to stay. "Never" feels so unfairly punitive. For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there.
Notes on Grief, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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classicbooks101 · 5 months
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To have love snatched from you, especially unexpectedly, and then to be told to turn to memories. Rather than succor, my memories bring eloquent stabs of pain that say, "This is what you will never again have."
Notes on Grief, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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classicbooks101 · 5 months
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I have mourned in the past but only now have I touched grief's core. Only now do I learn, while feeling for its porous edges, that there is no way through. I am in the center of this churning, and I have become a maker of boxes, and inside their unbending walls I cage my thoughts.
Notes on Grief, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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classicbooks101 · 5 months
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How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?
Notes on Grief, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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classicbooks101 · 5 months
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Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.
Notes on Grief, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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classicbooks101 · 8 months
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Walking slowly, I found myself not saying but feeling goodbye - not farewell. Farewell has a sweet sound of reluctance. Goodbye is short and final, a word with teeth sharp to bite through the string that ties past to future.
The Winter of Our Discontent, John Steinbeck 
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