's acclaimed 1990 work is a poignant collection of interrelated short stories that delve into the experiences of American Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and his fellow soldiers during the Vietnam War. Through vivid narratives, O'Brien, a Vietnam veteran himself, reveals each young man's physical and emotional burdens. These semiautobiographical stories explore the nature of truth and the fallibility of memory. Figures like the devout Kiowa, the troubled Norman Bowker, and the doomed Ted Lavender represent the perspectives and psychologies of the soldiers. O'Brien appears as a character, telling stories as he grapples with his own experiences and the "story-truth" versus "happening-truth" of the events.
Profoundly relevant today, The Things They Carried underscores the deep emotional truths about the effect of war on human beings. Through these interwoven tales, O'Brien illuminates the universal struggles of bravery and cowardice and the imperative to bear witness through storytelling. Here are 30+ thought-provoking quotes from The Things They Carried that explore the complex themes of memory, truth, the human condition, and the enduring impacts of war.
The best The Things They Carried quotes on the impact of stories
"Stories are for joining the past to the future."
"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."
"Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story."
"The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head."
"But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world."
"But this too is true: stories can save us."
The best The Things They Carried quotes on war and its toll
"I was a coward. I went to the war."
"He wished he could've explained some of this. How he had been braver than he ever thought possible, but how he had not been so brave as he wanted to be. The distinction was important."
"I survived, but it's not a happy ending."
"They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity."
"It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause."
