The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, shares stories about what some American soldiers carried in the Vietnam War.
Some of the things they carried were intangible, such as guilt and fear, while others were tangible, such as matches and weapons.
Reading reviews, soldiers who fought in Vietnam remembered things differently. Did they have different experiences during the war, or are these just stories?
The Things They Carried Quotes With Page Numbers
“They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 1, Page 7
“…his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 1, Page 11
“…he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered. He wanted her to be a virgin and not a virgin all at once. He wanted to know her. Intimate secrets: Why poetry? Why so sad? Why that grayness in her eyes? Why so alone? Not lonely, just alone – riding her bike across campus or sitting off by herself in the cafeteria – even dancing, she danced alone – and it was the aloneness that filled him with love. He remembered telling her that one evening. How she nodded and looked away. And how, later, 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.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 1, Page 11
“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.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 1, Page 14
“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. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice…. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 1, Page 20
“Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 1, Page 20
“It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do. ”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 3, Page 24
“The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, repaying itself over and over.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 3, Page 31
“But the thing about remembering is that you don’t forget.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 3, Page 33
“What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end…”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 3, Page 34
“And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. 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.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 3, Page 36
“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.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 4, Page 36
“Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. 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.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 4, Page 36
“All of us, I suppose, like to believe that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth, bravely and forthrightly, without thought of personal loss or discredit. Certainly that was my conviction back in the summer of 1968. Tim O’Brien: a secret hero. The Lone Ranger. If the stakes ever became high enough—if the evil were evil enough, if the good were good enough—I would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage that had been accumulating inside me over the years. Courage, I seemed to think, comes to us in finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be drawn down. It was a comforting theory. It dispensed with all those bothersome little acts of daily courage; it offered hope and grace to the repetitive coward; it justified the past while amortizing the future.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 4, Pages 37, 38
“Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 4, Page 38
“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. You can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 4, Pages 38, 39
“What would you do?
Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you’re leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 4, Page 54
“Even now, as I write this, I can still feel that tightness. And I want you to feel it–the wind coming off the river, the waves, the silence, the wooded frontier. You’re at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River. You’re twenty-one years old, you’re scared, and there’s a hard squeezing pressure in your chest.
What would you do?
Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you’re leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 4, Page 54
“I survived, but it’s not a happy ending.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 4, Page 58
“I was a coward. I went to the war.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 4, Page 58
“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.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 7, Page 65
“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. ”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 7, Page 66
“In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. .. The pictures get jumbled, you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 7, Pages 67, 68
“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, The Things They Carried, Chapter 7, Page 76
“To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil—everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self—your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 7, Page 77
“you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 7, Page 78
“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.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 7, Page 78
“You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let’s say, and afterward you ask, ‘Is it true?’ and if the answer matters, you’ve got your answer . . . Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 7, Page 79
“A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 7, Page 80
“I’ll picture Rat Kiley face, his grief, and I’ll think, You dumb cooze. Because she wasn’t listening. It wasn’t a war story. It was a love story. ”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 7, Page 81
“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.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 8, Page 82
“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.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 9, Page 85
“For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you’d find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 9, Pages 85, 86
When I’m out there at night I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving, my skin and 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.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 9, Page 106
“But I do like churches. The way it feels inside. It feels good when you just sit there, like you’re in a forest and everything’s really quiet, expect there’s still this sound you can’t hear.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 11, Page 116
“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.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 15, Page 147
“When a man died, there had to be blame. Jimmy Cross understood this. You could blame the war, You could blame the idiots who made the war. You could blame Kiowa for going to it. You could blame the rain. You could blame the river. You could blame the field, the mud, the climate. You could blame the enemy. You could blame the mortar rounds. You could blame people who were too lazy to read a newspaper, who were bored by the daily body counts, who switched channels at the mention of politics. You could blame whole nations. You could blame God. You could blame the munitions makers or Karl Marx or a trick of fate of an old man in Omaha who forgot to vote.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 18, Pages 169, 170
“I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 19, Page 171
“A lot like yesterday, a lot like never.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 20, Page 178
“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. It makes things vivid. When you’re afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world. You make close friends. You become part of a tribe and you share the same blood- you give it together, you take it together.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 21, Page 183
“When your afraid, reallyafraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 21, Page 183
“Together we understood what terror was: you’re not human anymore. You’re a shadow. You slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted to believed in. You know you’re about to die. And it’s not a movie and you aren’t a hero and all you can do is whimper and wait. ”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 21, Pages 200, 201
“But this too is true: stories can save us.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 23, Page 213
“But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 23, Page 213
“Linda was nine then, as I was, but we were in love…it had all the shadings and complexities of mature adult love and maybe more, because there were not yet words for it, and because it was not yet fixed to comparisons or chronologies or the ways by which adults measure such things…I just loved her. Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones — that kind of love.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 23, Page 216
“Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones – THAT kind of love.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 23, Page 216
“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. There is the illusion of aliveness.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 23, Page 218
“But in a story I can steal her soul.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 23, Page 224
“Well, right now…I’m not dead. But when I am, it’s like…I don’t know, I guess it’s like being inside a book that nobody’s reading. […] An old one. It’s up on a library shelf, so you’re safe and everything, but the book hasn’t been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody’ll pick it up and start reading.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 23, Page 232
“I’m skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Chapter 23, Page 233
What is the most important quote in The Things They Carried?
“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.”
~Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, Page 14
The Things They Carried Summary
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien is a collection of stories about a platoon of soldiers during the Vietnam War. The stories provide an intimate look at the life of soldiers, both on and off the battlefield.
On one level, it’s a book about the physical things they carried while in battle, such as weapons and ammo. On another level, it’s a book about the emotional and psychological baggage they carried in their hearts and minds.
O’Brien juxtaposes the physical with the emotional to create a powerful portrait of war and its aftermath. The Things They Carried shows how war fundamentally changes people, both physically and emotionally, even if they survive. Through his stories,
O’Brien conveys the pain, hardship, and loss endured by those who fought in Vietnam.
The Things They Carried is a gripping portrayal of war and its effects on soldiers that will leave readers with a greater understanding of the sacrifices made during this conflict.
Further Reading: