Quotes & Sayings About Tim O Brien

Courage is nothing to laugh at, not if it is proper courage and exercised by men who know what they do is proper. Proper courage is wise courage. It's acting wisely, acting wisely when fear would have a man act otherwise. It is the endurance of the soul in spite of fear - wisely. — Tim O'Brien

You don't have to be in Nam to be in Nam. — Tim O'Brien

We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it and guard it and hold it forever inaccessible. — Tim O'Brien

I live in my head all day long and the world is a little dreamy. — Tim O'Brien

But this too is true: stories can save us. — Tim O'Brien

'The Things They Carried' is labeled right inside the book as a work of fiction, but I did set out when I wrote the book to make it feel real ... I use my own name, and I dedicated the book to characters in the book to give it the form of a war memoir. — Tim O'Brien

But in a story I can steal her soul. — Tim O'Brien

Each of us, I suppose needs his illusions. Life after death. A maker of planets. A woman to love, a man to hate. Something sacred. But what a waste. — Tim O'Brien

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 days seemed to stretch out toward infinity, blank and humid, without purpose, and at night I was kept awake by the endless drone of mosquitoes and helicopters. (Why wars must be contested under such conditions I shall never understand. Is not death sufficient?) — Tim O'Brien

Peace never bragged. If you didn't look for it, it wasn't there. — Tim O'Brien

If you stop loving someone, did you ever love them? If you say you're committed and later you're not committed, well, was the first thing commitment? You see what I mean? This kind of thing has always interested me. — Tim O'Brien

After each of my books about the war has appeared, I thought it might be the last, but I've stopped saying that to myself. There are just too many stories left to tell - in fact, more all the time. — Tim O'Brien

But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget. — Tim O'Brien

Do we choose sleep? Hell no and bullshit - we fall. We give ourselves over to possibility, to whim and fancy, to the bed, to the pillow, the tiny white tablet. And these choose for us. — Tim O'Brien

They sat smoking the dead mans dope until the chopper came — Tim O'Brien

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. Still, — Tim O'Brien

Once someone's dead you can't make them undead. — Tim O'Brien

I did not set out to write another novel. One day I sat down with the thought of trying my hand at a piece of nonfiction, a personal memoir of youth, but over the next several weeks, without intending it, the work began evolving into what has become 'Tomcat in Love.' — Tim O'Brien

It's sad when you learn you're not much of a hero. — Tim O'Brien

Stories can save us. — Tim O'Brien

I received my draft notice right after graduation from college and had three months before going into the Army in September to think about it. — Tim O'Brien

What do you do when you get a draft notice and you think a war is wrong? And I struggled with that for months prior to my being inducted into the army, and I'm still struggling with it, 40 years later. — Tim O'Brien

I suppose if we gain anything from this unsought experience it will be an appreciation for honesty- frankness on the part of our politicians, our friends, our loves, ourselves. No more liars in public places. (And the bed and the bar are, in their way, as public as the floor of Congress.) — Tim O'Brien

They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards. — Tim O'Brien

And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. — Tim O'Brien

In fiction workshops, we tend to focus on matters of verisimilitude largely because such issues are so much easier to talk about than the failure of imagination. — Tim O'Brien

In February 1969, 25 years ago, I arrived as a young, terrified PFC on this lonely little hill in Quang Ngai Province. Back then, the place seemed huge and imposing and permanent. — Tim O'Brien

Inside I feel much like a 12-year-old or a 17-year-old who knows big words. — Tim O'Brien

Imagination, like reality, has its limits. — Tim O'Brien

There was the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry. — Tim O'Brien

The story' Sanders would say "the whole tone, man, you're wrecking it."
Tone?'
The sound. You need to get a consitent sound, like slow or fast, funny or sad. All these disgressions, they just screw up your story's sound. Stick to what happened. — Tim O'Brien

No matter how wonderful the story, it has to move on something, and that is language. The words that I use, the pace, the rhythm and cadences all need to be there. If they're not there, the story is like a boat that just sits there and doesn't move on the ocean. — Tim O'Brien

From the year of his birth in 1914 until the outbreak of war in 1941, my father lived in a mostly white, mostly working-class, mostly Irish Catholic neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. — Tim O'Brien

I saw no unity of purpose, no consensus on matters of philosophy or history or law. The very facts were shrouded in uncertainty: Was it a civil war? A war of national liberation or simple aggression? Who started it, and when, and why? What really happened to the USS Maddox on that dark night in the Gulf of Tonkin? Was Ho Chi Minh a Communist stooge, or a nationalist savior, or both, or neither? What about the Geneva Accords? What about SEATO and the Cold War? What about dominoes? America was divided on these and a thousand other issues, and the debate had spilled out across the floor of the United States Senate and into the streets, and smart men in pinstripes could not agree on even the most fundamental matters of public policy. The only certainty that summer was moral confusion. — Tim O'Brien

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 object of storytelling, like the object of magic, is not to explain or to resolve, but rather to create and to perform miracles of the imagination. To extend the boundaries of the mysterious. To push into the unknown in pursuit of still other unknowns. To reach into one's heart, down into that place where the stories are, bringing up the mystery of oneself. — Tim O'Brien

If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth. — Tim O'Brien

It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do. — Tim O'Brien

Money was never a problem, passports were never required. There were always new places to dance. — Tim O'Brien

I cannot remember much, I cannot feel much. Maybe erasure is necessary. Maybe the human spirit defends itself as the body does, attacking infection, enveloping and destroying those malignancies that would otherwise consume us. — Tim O'Brien

Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth. — Tim O'Brien

In a war without aim, you tend not to aim. You close your eyes, close your heart. The consequences become hit or miss in the most literal sense. — Tim O'Brien

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

We tend to regard history as true and 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' as untrue. That's always puzzled me. — Tim O'Brien

I returned to Vietnam in '94, and even then, all those decades later, walking around that place, I remained afraid. And, in some ways, rightly so. — Tim O'Brien

Don't throw away luck on little stuff. Save it up. — Tim O'Brien

Sometimes the bravest thing in the world was to sit through the night and feel the cold in your bones. — Tim O'Brien

The afternoon had passed to a ghostly gray. She was struck by the immensity of things, so much water and sky and forest, and after a time it occurred to her that she'd lived a life almost entirely indoors. Her memories were indoor memories, fixed by ceilings and plastered white walls. Her whole life had been locked to geometries: suburban rectangles, city squares. First the house she'd grown up in, then dorms and apartments. The open air had been nothing but a medium of transit, a place for rooms to exist. — Tim O'Brien

I was a coward. I went to the war. — Tim O'Brien

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

I could feel my moral compass as a soldier, in danger of - I could feel the squeeze, the pressure of frustration and anger and fear combining on me ... I felt the danger; I felt the squeeze of it. — Tim O'Brien

Most of this I've told before, or at least hinted at, but what I have never told is the full truth. How I cracked. How at work one morning, standing on the pig line, I felt something break open in my chest. I don't know what it was. I'll never know. But it was real, I know that much, it was a physical rapture
a cracking-leaking-popping feeling. I remember dropping my water gun. Quickly, almost without thought, I took off my apron and walked out of the plant and drove home. It was midmorning, I remember, and the house was empty. Down in my chest there was still that leaking sensation, something very warm and precious spilling out, and I was covered with blood and hog-stink, and for a long while I just concentrated on holding myself together. — Tim O'Brien

A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written. — Tim O'Brien

In battle, in a war, a soldier sees only a tiny fragment of what is available to be seen. The soldier is not a photographic machine. He is not a camera. He registers, so to speak, only those few items that he is predisposed to register and not a single thing more. Do you understand this? So I am saying to you that after a battle each soldier will have different stories to tell, vastly different stories, and that when a was is ended it is as if there have been a million wars, or as many wars as there were soldiers. — Tim O'Brien

In many ways he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intentions, a roll of fat jiggling at his belly, slow of foot but always plodding along, always there when you needed him, a believer in the virtues of simplicity and directness and hard labor. — Tim O'Brien

Since I was a kid. I had this series by Ballantine Books about the history of World Wars I and II. In my 20s, it was the Vietnam War literature of novelists like Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, and Tobias Wolff, and then nonfiction such as "A Bright Shining Lie" by Neil Sheehan and "The Best and Brightest" by David Halberstam . Those are the two best histories of Vietnam. — George Packer

There should be a law, I though. If you support a war, if you think it's worth the price, that's fine, but you he to put your own precious fluids on the line. You have to head for the front and hook up with an infantry unit and help spill the blood. And you have to bring along your wife, or your kids, or your lover. A law, I thought. — Tim O'Brien

He felt crazy sometimes. Real depravity. Late at night an electric sizzle came into his blood, a tight pumped-up killing rage, and he couldn't keep it in and he couldn't let it out. He wanted to hurt things. Grab a knife and start cutting and slashing and never stop. All those years. Climbing like a son of a bitch, clawing his way up inch by fucking inch, and then it all came crashing down at once. — Tim O'Brien

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

You don't know. 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

Each morning, despite the unknowns, they made their legs move. — Tim O'Brien

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.
I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again. — Tim O'Brien

But this too is true: stories save us. — Tim O'Brien

Imagination is a killer. — Tim O'Brien

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

It's one thing to say you're for the war; it's another thing to send your kid to war - your daughter or your son. — Tim O'Brien

The world comes at me that way - comes at me in clumps of stuff, sometimes little vignettes and sometimes whole stories. And then the rest is erased by the internal filter that erases things for the same reason you'd forget swatting a mosquito. — Tim O'Brien

The presence of danger has a way of making you feel fully awake. — Tim O'Brien

Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons. — Tim O'Brien

We'll find new stuff to want. — Tim O'Brien

By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. — Tim O'Brien

They were afraid of dieing, but they were even more afraid to show it. — Tim O'Brien

The people in 'July, July' do find themselves looking backward, talking to others and to themselves about those over-the-cliff, fork-in-the-road moments in their lives. I imagine this is what must happen at a 30th college reunion. — Tim O'Brien

Vietnam was the defining event for my generation. It spilled over into all facets of American life - into music, into the pulpits, in churches of our country. It spilled over into the city streets, police forces. And even if you were born late in the generation, Vietnam was still part of your childhood. — Tim O'Brien

Place is so important to me. The Midwest is like a ghost in my life. It's present as I look out the window now. I see Texas, but if I close my eyes and look out the same window, I'm back in my hometown in Worthington, Minnesota, and I cherish those values and that diction. — Tim O'Brien

Words, too, have genuine substance
mass and weight and specific gravity. — Tim O'Brien

A giddy feeling, in a way, except there was the dreamy edge of impossibility to it - like running a dead-end maze - no way out - it couldn't come to a happy conclusion and yet I was doing it anyway because it was all I could think of to do. — Tim O'Brien

Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth. — Tim O'Brien

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

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

Is the Mona Lisa an 'accurate' representation of the actual human model for the painting? Who knows? Who cares? It's a great piece of art. It moves us. It makes us wonder, makes us gape - finally makes us look inward at ourselves. — Tim O'Brien

The day was cloudy. I passed through towns with familiar last names, through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war. — Tim O'Brien

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

But truly it was not the money that mattered. It was the distant glitter of everything that was possible in the world, the things she had always wanted for herself and could not name and called happiness because there was no other word. — Tim O'Brien

She'd say amazing things sometimes. "Once you're alive," she'd say, "you cant ever be dead. — Tim O'Brien

I heard water evaporating. I heard the tick of my own biology. — Tim O'Brien

They didn't know the first thing about Diem's tyranny, or the nature of Vietnamese nationalism, or the long colonialism of the French - this was all too damned complicated, it required some reading - but no matter, it was a war to stop the Communists, plain and simple, which was how they liked things, and you were a treasonous pussy if you had second thoughts about killing or dying for plain and simple reasons. I — Tim O'Brien

Unlike Chicago or New York, small-town Minnesota did not allow a man's failings to disappear beneath a veil of numbers. People talked. Secrets did not stay secret. — Tim O'Brien

I don't think I'd call myself a war writer, but I would probably say I'm a writer who has written about war. — Tim O'Brien

All that peace, man, if felt so good it hurt. I want to hurt it back. — Tim O'Brien

Kiowa who saw it happen said it was like watching a rock fall, or a big sandbag or something-Just Boom-then down. Not like in the movies where the dead guy rolls around and does fancy spins and goes ass over teakettle-not like that. Kiowa said. The bastard just flat fuck fell. Boom down. Nothing else. — Tim O'Brien

I guess we're really brothers, aren't we? Don't know what that means, except it means that some of the same things we remember. — Tim O'Brien

I drank some chocolate milk and then lay down on the sofa in my "living" room, not really sad, just floating; trying to imagine what it was to be dead. Nothing much came to me. I remember closing my eyes and whispering her name, trying to make her come back. As we stared at each other, neither of us moving, I felt some ... thing go shut in my heart while something else swung open — Tim O'Brien

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. — Tim O'Brien

Poetry is not an issue of form and enjambments. Poetry, as the word is classically used, has to do with sound and sense. It can be rhyme. It can be rhythm, pace, breath. — Tim O'Brien

How do you generalize? 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. The truths are contradictory. — Tim O'Brien

And as a writer now, I want to save Linda's life. Not her body
her life. — Tim O'Brien

It's very hard to articulate the things that are important about writing. — Tim O'Brien

And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe Oh. — Tim O'Brien