Tim O'leary Quotes & Sayings

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

Everybody's enamored of the iPhone, the Google phone. But the applications are going to change. You know, we're going to start using our phones for shopping. It's going to change the nature of advertising. — Tim O'Reilly

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

The Vulgar sham of the pompous feast Where the heaviest purse is the highest priest The organised charity, scrimped and iced In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ."1 - John Boyle O'Reilly — Tim Pat Coogan

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

I think that Microsoft will increasingly feel margin pressure from Linux as well as people saying: well actually the applications that really matter to me are not on my PC. And so they're going to be able to extract less of a monopoly rent, so to speak. — Tim O'Reilly

How could any man live a happy life, knowing that the person they loved, the person they would give their life for, was with another. — Tim O'Rourke

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

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie - deliberate, contrived and dishonest - but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." ~ John F. Kennedy — Tim O'Shea

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

I've been deeply influenced by Aristotle's idea that virtue is a habit, something you practice and get better at, rather than something that comes naturally. 'The control of the appetites by right reason,' is how he defined it. — Tim O'Reilly

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

Oh no?" he sneered, pulling a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and lighting one up. "Knowing what you're like, the slightest sign of a discarded cigarette butt and you would've been crawling around on your hands and knees trying to figure out how tall the smoker was, how old he was, what zodiac sign he was, whether he'd taken a crap that morning, and Christ knows what else. — Tim O'Rourke

Just as the PC bled back into industrial economy, I think the Internet is going to bleed back into our overall economy and have a transformative effect on major sectors that we don't yet foresee. — Tim O'Reilly

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

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

The nice thing about twitter is the architecture of visibility. Email is invisible unless you reach out to someone directly. With Twitter, anyone can follow you and this is one of the big changes that was really introduced by Flickr, was this wonderful idea that you can follow somebody without their permission. Recognizing that relationships are asymmetrical, unlike facebook where we have to acknowledge each other otherwise we can't see each other. — Tim O'Reilly

Life is not a tour of gas stations. — Tim O'Reilly

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

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

A book is always a dialogue with other readers and other books. — Tim O'Reilly

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

Pursue something so important that even if you fail, the world is better off with you having tried. — Tim O'Reilly

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

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

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

We want to show how technology can be applied to fix our problems. We need to celebrate not just success but to celebrate people who make a difference. It starts with people who do things for love, with no expectation of return. Some of that turns into enormous financial success, and then some of it goes back into doing it for love. — Tim O'Reilly

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

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

Imagination is a killer. — 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

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

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

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

Do you know what vengence is, Tim? It is a dark mirror in which we cannot see ourselves. — Patrick O'Leary

Being too early is indistinguishable from being wrong. — Tim O'Reilly

The future is always scary to those who cling to the past. — Tim O'Reilly

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

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

The problem for most artists isn't piracy, it's obscurity. — Tim O'Reilly

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

I can promise you, Potter, that there is nothing you could ever do that would excite me. — Tim O'Rourke

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

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

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

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

I find that creative streak I think often leads in programmers to be good predictors of where culture as a whole is going to go. And that is where I think I've tried over the years to in some ways use my customers as a filter or a predictor of where technology as a whole is going to go. Or where the world as a whole is going to go. — Tim O'Reilly

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

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

Early on, when software was developed by computer scientists, just people working with computers, people passed around software because that was how you got computers to do things. — Tim O'Reilly

There is people who make stuff with words. There is people who make stuff with programs. And I really believe that that whole creative culture, people didn't realize how creative programming is. And anybody who's done it of course knows that not only is it creative, but it's incredibly absorbing. — Tim O'Reilly

Ruby on Rails is a breakthrough in lowering the barriers of entry to programming.
Powerful web applications that formerly might have taken weeks or months
to develop can be produced in a matter of days. — Tim O'Reilly

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

Taking the sweatshirt, he raised it to his face and sniffed the bloodstains left on it. — Tim O'Rourke

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

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

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

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

Regardless of religion (or lack thereof), lovers of speculative fiction will swallow up these provocative stories. - Erin O'Riordan, — Tim Lieder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A lot of my energy is going to Code for America, Jen Pahlka's non-profit startup. We're doing a lot of great work teaching government how to apply technology and changing the culture of government. — Tim O'Reilly

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

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

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

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

Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons. — 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

I came up with the idea that I wanted to develop products because I saw services businesses being a dead end long term. — Tim O'Reilly

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

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

'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' was this role that utterly fell into my lap and changed my life. — Tim Blake Nelson

A short, glorious life in service of a greater good - say, the life of the Spartans at Thermopylae, or the pilots in the Battle of Britain, of whom Winston Churchill said 'Never have so many owed so much to so few,' - that is worth praising. But for glory alone? I think not. — Tim O'Reilly

Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy. — Tim O'Reilly