Quotes By Letter: O

“Usually when I was alone in the house during the evening, I had to turn on every single light, but I didn't care that night. So what if a hand came out from under the bed and grabbed me? That would be nothing. They say that certain things are going to be terrible and that they are going to destroy you, but they don't. I sat on the side of the bed. It was as if my soul had been frozen, and I waited for it to thaw, in order to get on with life.”

-Lullabies For Little Criminals, Heather O'Neill

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“A nothing is a dreadful thing to hold onto.”

-Edna O'Brien

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“'You just don't know,' she said. 'You hide in this little fortress, behind wire and sandbags, and you don't know what it's all about. Sometimes I want to eat this place. Vietnam. I want to swallow the whole country -- the dirt, the death -- I just want to eat it and have it there inside me. That's how I feel. It's like... this appetite. I get scared sometimes -- lots of times -- but it's not bad. You know? I feel close to myself. When I'm out there at night, I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving, my skin and my fingernails, everything, it's like I'm full of electricity and I'm glowing in the dark -- I'm on fire almost -- I'm burning away into nothing -- But it doesn't matter because I know exactly who I am. You can't feel like that anywhere else.'”

-The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien

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“...when he kissed her, she received the kiss without returning it, her eyes wide open, not afraid, not a virgin's eyes, just flat and uninvolved.”

-The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien

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“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. Listen to Rat Kiley. Cooze, he says. He does not say bitch. He certainly does not say woman, or girl. He says cooze. Then he spits and stares. He's nineteen years old--it's too much for him--so he looks at you with those big sad gentle killer eyes and says cooze, because his friend is dead, and because it's so incredibly sad and true: she never wrote back.

You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty.

Listen to Rat: 'Jesus Christ, man, I write this beautiful fuckin' letter, I slave over it, and what happens? The dumb cooze never writes back.'”

-The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien

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“For the most part they carried themselves with a poise, a kind of dignity. Now and then, however, there were times of panic, when they squealed or wanted to squeal but couldn't, when they twitched and made moaning sounds and covered their heads and said Dear Jesus and flopped around on the earth and fired their weapons blindly and cringed and sobbed and begged for the noise to stop and went wild and made stupid promises to themselves and to God and to their mothers and fathers, hoping not to die.”

-The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien

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“It was a mistake, my being born a man. I'd have been better off as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!”

-Journey into Night, Eugene O'Neill

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“From the way that people have always talked about your heart being broken, it sort of seemed to be a one-time thing. Mine seemed to break all the time.”

-Lullabies For Little Criminals, Heather O'Neill

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“Your superhuman power was to be able not to feel. Is it there inside everybody, this self that comes out while you are in captivity? You become the closest approximation of yourself that can tolerate living there.”

-Lullabies For Little Criminals, Heather O'Neill

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“We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.”

-Ode, Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy

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“Blood transforms the warm bath water
and, in it, I see weakly
that this was a mistake.
The razor's cut is not deep, nevertheless
the blood rushes out happily in the warm
water as if kin to it, the same
tender substance.

Rising
a new person
transformed with an icy
sense of error
I go to the sink and turn on cold water
which is not friendly to blood.
The cut is deeper than imagined.”

-Passing An Afternoon, Joyce Carol Oates

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“Her name was Connie. She was fifteen and she had a quick, nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or checking other people's faces to make sure her own was all right. Her mother, who noticed everything and knew everything and who hadn't much reason any longer to look at her own face, always scolded Connie about it. 'Stop gawking at yourself. Who are you? You think you're so pretty?' she would say. Connie would raise her eyebrows at these familiar old complaints and look right through her mother, into a shadowy vision of herself as she was right at that moment: she knew she was pretty and that was everything.”

-Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, Joyce Carol Oates

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“Then, by degrees, she'd realized, no, no, I am not like this at all, I am the person I always was, from the first, I don't need others to define me, it's in fact others who misdefine me.”

-Will You Always Love Me?, Joyce Carol Oates

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“If they tell you that she died of sleeping pills you must know that she died of a wasting grief, of a slow bleeding at the soul.”

-Clifford Odets

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“Is anybody even there
who doesn't just pretend to care
This time I need to know - are you there?
Does anybody think they can
Begin to even understand
This time I need to know - are you there?”

-Are You There?, Oleander

Recommended by elias.

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“...this is the nature of depression: that unfocused wandering, that need to sleep, that disinterest in life's business, a feeling of being overwhelmed by life's maintenance, subsumed by sloth.”

-Welcome To My Planet...Where English Is Sometimes Spoken, Shannon Olson

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“Maybe this is a strategy I should adopt. When my mom asks me how my thesis is going, I could answer, 'I'm learning a lot,' without extrapolating. I'm learning a lot about what it means to be addicted to television. I'm learning a lot about what it means to run your credit cards up to unmanageable levels. There is an interesting dust bunny behind the door in the bathroom. I am learning that these things don't go away by themselves, that dust bunnies need some encouragement. There is a pile of paper around my desk that almost goes up to my knees. It's like wading through a swamp to get to my computer; I lift my legs high, step over things, try not to get stuck in the muck. I am learning about the nature of stasis, how piles do not change until tripped over or physically shoved aside. I am learning the laws of physics through practical experiments. How a body that is not in motion seems to have trouble leaving her apartment. I am learning a lot.”

-Welcome To My Planet...Where English Is Sometimes Spoken, Shannon Olson

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“More and more, my blood feels as though it's filled with cement.”

-Welcome To My Planet...Where English Is Sometimes Spoken, Shannon Olson

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“[...] the darkness squeezes you inside yourself, you get cut off from the outside world, the imagination takes over [...] nothing to do but stare into the big black hole at the center of your own sorry soul.”

-The Ghost Soldiers, Tim O'Brien

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“I would meet you now
and I would wish this scar
to have been given with
all the love
that never occurred between us.”

-The Time Around Scars, Michael Ondaatje

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“Throw your life away,
It will come back in the end
If you still believe,
But you wish not to pretend.”

-Tapwater, Onesidezero

Recommended by Manda.

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“Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.”

-George Orwell

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“'Does he exist in the same way I exist?'
'You do not exist.'”

-1984, George Orwell

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“'They can't get inside you,' she had said. But they could get inside you. 'What happens to you here is forever,' O'Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover. Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.”

-1984, George Orwell

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“'We may be together for six months, a year. There's no knowing. At the end we're certain to be apart. Do you realize how utterly alone we shall be? When once they get a hold of us there will be nothing, literally nothing that either of us can do for the other. If I confess they will shoot you, and if I refuse they'll shoot you just the same. Nothing I can do or say, or stop myself from saying will put off your death for more than five minutes. Neither of us will even know if the other one is alive or dead. We shall be utterly without power of any kind. The one thing that matters is that we shouldn't betray each one another, although that can't make the slightest difference.'

'If you mean confessing,' she said 'we shall do that, right enough. Everybody always confesses. You can't help it. They torture you.'

'I don't mean confessing. Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter: only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you- that would be the real betrayal.'”

-1984, George Orwell

Recommended by Kaylee.

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