Tim O'Brien Quotes & Sayings

#1. Hear that quiet, man?' he said. 'That quiet - just listen. There's your moral.

#2. You learn, finally, that you'll die, and so you try to hang on to your own life, that gentle, naive kid you used to be, but then after a while the sentiment takes over, and the sadness, because you know for a fact that you can't ever bring any of it back again. You just can't.

Tim O'Brien

#3. 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 or believed in.

Tim O'Brien

#4. I heard water evaporating. I heard the tick of my own biology.

Tim O'Brien

#5. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever.

Tim O'Brien

#6. Why do our politicians put warnings on cigarette packs and not on their own foreheads?

Tim O'Brien

#7. I hated the draft, but at the same time, it's something that made every American take war seriously.

Tim O'Brien

#8. What is love, for God's sake, if not the most distilled obsession?

Tim O'Brien

#9. The presence of danger has a way of making you feel fully awake.

Tim O'Brien

#10. 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

#11. He believed in mission. But . . . he did not believe in it as an intellectual imperative, or even as a professional standard. Mission . . . was an abstract notion that took meaning in concrete situations.

Tim O'Brien

#12. He'd been coiled like a snake for years and the tension had gone slack and when he was ready to spring the spring wasn't there, but it could be recoiled.

Tim O'Brien

#13. (My sole fond memory from this period is of a rubbery little Appalachian number by the name of June. Acrobatic tongue. Tooth decay. Illiterate in everything but love.)

Tim O'Brien

#14. I live in my head all day long and the world is a little dreamy.

Tim O'Brien

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. I have tried, of course, to be faithful to the evidence. Yet evidence is not truth. It is only evident.

Tim O'Brien

#18. Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth.

Tim O'Brien

#19. There's something about being amid the chaos and the horror of a war that makes you appreciate all you don't have - and all you may lose forever.

Tim O'Brien

#20. I grew up with the Gene Kelly look at war. The cheerful kind of stories you tell about a horrendous war.

Tim O'Brien

#21. Stories are not explanations of the world we live in. Science does that, and math does that. Our obligation as fiction writers is to enhance the mysteries.

Tim O'Brien

#22. I'm not dead. But when I am, it's likeI don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading.

Tim O'Brien

#23. 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.

Tim O'Brien

#24. Stories can save us.

Tim O'Brien

#25. 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

#26. To be memorable and to have dramatic impact, informational detail must function actively within the dynamic of a story.

Tim O'Brien

#27. Why do fairy tales exist, and why do movies exist? Why do novels exist? There has to be a reason for it; otherwise, none of these things would be there.

Tim O'Brien

#28. It's very hard to articulate the things that are important about writing.

Tim O'Brien

#29. Each morning, despite the unknowns, they made their legs move.

Tim O'Brien

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. But in a story I can steal her soul.

Tim O'Brien

#33. 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

#34. Courage was not always a matter of yes or no. Sometimes it came in degrees, like the cold; sometimes you were very brave up to a point and then beyond that point you were not so brave.

Tim O'Brien

#35. A miracle to confound natural law, a baffling reversal of the inevitable consequences ... a miracle ... An act of high imagination
daring and lurid and impossible. Yes, a cartoon of the mind.

Tim O'Brien

#36. In a way I wanted to stop myself. It was cruel, I knew that, but right and wrong were somewhere else.

Tim O'Brien

#37. Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has.

Tim O'Brien

#38. Who do you call a civilian in a guerilla war? I mean, it might be a farmer by day or a merchant, a housewife, and by night the housewife may be helping to make landmines and booby traps and who knows.

Tim O'Brien

#39. It's not just the embarrassment of tears. That's part of it, no doubt, but what embarrasses me much more, and always will, is the paralysis that took my heart. A moral freeze: I couldn't decide, I couldn't act, I couldn't comport myself with even a pretense of modest human dignity.

Tim O'Brien

#40. Once you're alive, you can't ever be dead.

Tim O'Brien

#41. But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget.

Tim O'Brien

#42. For me, at least, Vietnam was partly love. With each step, each light-year of a second, a foot soldier is always almost dead, or so it feels, and in such circumstances, you can't help but love.

Tim O'Brien

#43. There was the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.

Tim O'Brien

#44. When you're so close to material, it would be as if you had come out of a bad marriage. You would be so close to it that you would be paying attention to detail that may not mean a whole lot for the reader.

Tim O'Brien

#45. We'll find new stuff to want.

Tim O'Brien

#46. Oh, man, you fuckin' trashed the fucker," Azar said. " You scrambled his sorry self, look at that, you did, you laid him out like Shredded fuckin' Wheat"
"Go away," Kiowa said.
"I'm just saying the truth. Like oatmeal.

Tim O'Brien

#47. How crazy it was that people who were so incredibly alive could get so incredibly dead

Tim O'Brien

#48. A place where your life exists before you live it, and where it goes afterwards.

Tim O'Brien

#49. I am forever astonished at the longevity of childhood. How it never ends. How we are what we were. How turtles and engines and stolen kisses leave their jet trail across our gaping lives.

Tim O'Brien

#50. 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

#51. Stories can encourage us and embolden us to face ourselves and to feel. Stories can make us feel less alone. If we're reading a story that moves us, we can feel that emotion that I feel towards my father or mother or girlfriend. So they can give us late-night company.

Tim O'Brien

#52. 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

#53. They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak.

Tim O'Brien

#54. With a hangover and with fear, it is difficult to put a helmet on your head.

Tim O'Brien

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

Tim O'Brien

#56. A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.

Tim O'Brien

#57. And now it is time for a final act of courage. I urge you: March proudly into your own dream.

Tim O'Brien

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. 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

Tim O'Brien

#61. 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

#62. Once someone's dead you can't make them undead.

Tim O'Brien

#63. A true war story is never moral.

Tim O'Brien

#64. 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

#65. A bullet can kill the enemy, but a bullet can also produce an enemy, depending on whom that bullet strikes.

Tim O'Brien

#66. It's sad when you learn you're not much of a hero.

Tim O'Brien

#67. 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

#68. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture

Tim O'Brien

#69. War is a fundamental aspect of human existence. It's good to know what war entails and what the human sacrifice is.

Tim O'Brien

#70. The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, repaying itself over and over.

Tim O'Brien

#71. I've been surprised by Austin. I had a cowboy image of the place. It's a pretty sophisticated city - in some ways, more sophisticated than Boston. And there's a lighter feel to the place. It's very good for my spirits.

Tim O'Brien

#72. They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness.

Tim O'Brien

#73. I learned that moral courage is harder than physical courage.

Tim O'Brien

#74. 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

#75. And as a writer now, I want to save Linda's life. Not her body
her life.

Tim O'Brien

#76. Her white skin and those dark brown eyes and the way she always smiled at the world - always, it seemed - as if her face had been designed that way. The smile never went away.

Tim O'Brien

#77. She'd say amazing things sometimes. "Once you're alive," she'd say, "you cant ever be dead.

Tim O'Brien

#78. 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.

Tim O'Brien

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. Precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated.

Tim O'Brien

#84. I know what it is to feel unloved, to want revenge, to make mistakes, to suffer disappointment, yet also to find the courage to go forward in life.

Tim O'Brien

#85. A lot like yesterday, a lot like never.

Tim O'Brien

#86. What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end ...

Tim O'Brien

#87. 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

#88. A writer's obligation is to invent: to go beyond what did happen and to look at what could have happened but didn't. Fiction writers are born liars.

Tim O'Brien

#89. 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

#90. I didn't get into writing to make money or get famous or any of that. I got into it to hit hearts, and man, when I get letters not just from the soldiers but from their kids, especially their kids, it makes it all worthwhile.

Tim O'Brien

#91. When I have a book I enjoy, I'm partly in the book. I'm not just observing it.

Tim O'Brien

#92. At the bottom, all wars are the same because they involve death and maiming and wounding, and grieving mothers, fathers, sons and daughters.

Tim O'Brien

#93. Inside I feel much like a 12-year-old or a 17-year-old who knows big words.

Tim O'Brien

#94. Nostalgia
that's the basic sickness, and I never heard of a doctor who can cure it.

Tim O'Brien

#95. 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