30+ of the best quotes from "The Things They Carried"

Tim O'Brien's acclaimed 1990 work The Things They Carried 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

1. "Stories are for joining the past to the future."

2. "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."

3. "Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story."

4. "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."

5. "But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world."

6. "But this too is true: stories can save us."

The best The Things They Carried quotes on war and its toll

1. "I was a coward. I went to the war."

2. "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."

3. "I survived, but it's not a happy ending."

4. "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."

5. "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."

6.  "You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead."

7. "It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do."

8. "They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing–these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight."

9. "They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to."

10. "It's a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn't felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake."

11. "They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried."

12. "Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons."

The best The Things They Carried quotes on memory and truth

1. "A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth."

2. "I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth."

3. "But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget."

4. "It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite; he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt."

5. "What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end."

6. "In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true."

7. "Absolute occurrence is irrelevant."

The best The Things They Carried quotes on perception and illusion

1. "You don't know. When I'm out there at night I feel close to my own body"

2. "You're never more alive than when you're almost dead."

3. "He had an opinion of himself, I think, that was too high for his own good. Or maybe it was the reverse. Maybe it was a low opinion that he kept trying to erase."

4. "When you're afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world."

5. "And as a writer now, I want to save Linda's life. Not her body–her life."

6. "In a way I wanted to stop myself. It was cruel, I knew that, but right and wrong were somewhere else."