Ash ley ’s Reviews > The Things They Carried > Status Update

i have been loving this so far. not rushing through it. it’s a great book to pick up and put down. story telling tim o’brien has such a gift at making you think about your own stories. how do we tell our own stories of war. what do we imagine, what’s real when it all is a memory.

he’s normalized how crazy i’ve felt in my darkest moments. outstanding writing.

Jesus christ, it’s against the rules, Sanders said. Against human nature. This elaborate story, you can’t say, hey by the way I don’t know the ending. I mean you go certain obligations.

what you have to do, sanders said is trust your own story. get the hell out of the way and let it tell itself.

“in war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore its safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.”

“just came to me, the moral i mean. Nobody listens. Nobody hears nothin’. What they need to do is go out on LP. The vapors, man. Trees and rocks - you got to listen to your enemy”

“stories are for eternity, when the memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

“men killed and died, because they were embarrassed not to. They died so not to die of embarrassment. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards”.