~Tim O'Brien from THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

"The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, you can't help but gape at the awful majesty of combat."

~Tim O'Brien from THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

"War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. war is nasty; war is fun. war is thrilling; war is drudgery. war makes you a man; war makes you dead."

~Tim O'Brien from THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

"... the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. you pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents taht did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.

~Captain Peleg from Herman Melville’s MOLBY-DICK

“Can’t ye see the world from where you stand?”

~Tim O'Brien from THE THINGS THEY CARRIED

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

~Kurt Vonnegut

"Be careful who you pretend to be, because you are who you pretend to be."

~Jorge Luis Borges from the short story “The Library of Babel”

"This philosopher observed that all books, however different from one another they might be, consist of identical elements: the space, the period, the comma, and the twenty-two letters of the alphabet."