Top 100 Quotes About Tim O'brien
#1. Tim O'Brien's book about Vietnam, 'The Things They Carried', has won every award, is studied in college and is considered to be definitive. But it's fiction.
Dave Eggers
#2. There is a lot of evidence to back up the assertion that war fiction takes time. Many all-time classics of the genre, from Erich Maria Remarque's 'All Quiet on the Western Front' to Joseph Heller's 'Catch-22' to Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried,' took over a decade to pen.
Matt Gallagher
#3. I love fiction. I like reading short stories. Cupcakes, pop songs, Polaroids, and short stories. They all raise and answer questions in a short space. I like Lorrie Moore. Amy Hempel. Tim O'Brien. Raymond Carver. All the heartbreakers.
Laurel Nakadate
#4. Margaret Atwood, J.G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Jim Crace, Arthur C. Clarke, Russell Hoban, Anna Kavan, Doris Lessing, Cormac McCarthy, Walter M. Miller, Tim O'Brien, Will Self and Marcel Theroux,
Bill Bryson
#5. Hear that quiet, man?' he said. 'That quiet - just listen. There's your moral.
Tim O'Brien
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Don't throw away luck on little stuff. Save it up.
Tim O'Brien
#9. I heard water evaporating. I heard the tick of my own biology.
Tim O'Brien
#10. That you don't make war without knowing why.
Tim O'Brien
#11. 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
#13. It was a flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher, spinning off the edge of the earth and beyond the sun and through the vast silent vacuum where there were no burdens and where everything weighed exactly nothing.
Tim O'Brien
#14. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever.
Tim O'Brien
#15. Why do our politicians put warnings on cigarette packs and not on their own foreheads?
Tim O'Brien
#16. I hated the draft, but at the same time, it's something that made every American take war seriously.
Tim O'Brien
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. What is love, for God's sake, if not the most distilled obsession?
Tim O'Brien
#20. 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
#21. Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you.
Tim O'Brien
#22. The presence of danger has a way of making you feel fully awake.
Tim O'Brien
#23. '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
#24. 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
#26. Everything was such a damned nice idea when it was an idea.
Tim O'Brien
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. (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
#31. I live in my head all day long and the world is a little dreamy.
Tim O'Brien
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Fantasy has a dark side to it. It also has a light hemisphere - the power of the human imagination to keep going, to imagine a better tomorrow.
Tim O'Brien
#35. My whole life seemed to spill out into the river, swirling away from me, everything I had ever been or ever wanted to be.
Tim O'Brien
#36. 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
#37. The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.
Tim O'Brien
#38. A nine-year-old girl, just a kid, and yet there was something ageless in her eyes - not a child, not an adult - just an ongoing everness, that same pinprick of absolute lasting light that I see today in my own eyes as Timmy smiles at Tim from the graying photographs of that time.
Tim O'Brien
#39. A few names were known in full, some in part, some not at all. No one cared. Except in clearly unreasonable cases, a soldier was generally called by the name he preferred, or by what he called himself, and no great effort was made to disentangle Christian names from surnames from nicknames.
Tim O'Brien
#40. It was not battle, it was just the endless march, village to village, without
purpose, nothing won or lost. They marched for the sake of the march.
Tim O'Brien
#41. I have tried, of course, to be faithful to the evidence. Yet evidence is not truth. It is only evident.
Tim O'Brien
#42. Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth.
Tim O'Brien
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. He showed me how ... See, he says he's going up through Laos, then into Burma, and then some other country, I forget, and then India and Iran and Turkey, and then Greece, and the rest is easy. That's what he said. The rest is easy, he said.
Tim O'Brien
#46. 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
#47. I grew up with the Gene Kelly look at war. The cheerful kind of stories you tell about a horrendous war.
Tim O'Brien
#48. 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
#49. Did I choose this life of illusion? Don't be mad. My bed was made, I just lied in it.
Tim O'Brien
#50. 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
#51. Everywhere, it seemed, in the tress and water and sky, a great worldwide sadness came pressing down on me, a crushing sorrow, sorrow like I had never known it before.
Tim O'Brien
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Theatre outings are my favourite thing to spend money on. The most influential play I saw was 'Bent,' which starred Ian McKellen. And I loved the original performance of 'The Rocky Horror Show,' with Richard O'Brien and Tim Curry at the Royal Court, when I was about 15.
Dawn French
#56. The wars don't end when you sign peace treaties or when the years go by. They will echo on until I'm gone and all the widows and orphans are gone.
Tim O'Brien
#57. 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
#58. To be memorable and to have dramatic impact, informational detail must function actively within the dynamic of a story.
Tim O'Brien
#59. I survived, but it's not a happy ending.
Tim O'Brien
#60. There is always the threat of tomorrow's treachery, or next year's treachery, or the treachery implicit in all the tomorrows beyond that.
Tim O'Brien
#61. They were afraid of dieing, but they were even more afraid to show it.
Tim O'Brien
#62. 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
#63. It's very hard to articulate the things that are important about writing.
Tim O'Brien
#64. Each morning, despite the unknowns, they made their legs move.
Tim O'Brien
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. Peace never bragged. If you didn't look for it, it wasn't there.
Tim O'Brien
#68. 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
#70. 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
#71. All that peace, man, if felt so good it hurt. I want to hurt it back.
Tim O'Brien
#72. 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
#73. All around me the options seemed to be narrowing, as if I were hurtling down a huge black funnel, the whole world squeezing in tight.
Tim O'Brien
#74. 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
#75. Sure, best seller. I'd love to knock Stephen King off the top of the list. I know I won't, but, after all, I spend my life inventing a different reality.
Tim O'Brien
#76. A small, seemingly inconsequential event can determine a life.
Tim O'Brien
#77. Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it's not science, it's an exploration, but you never find much in the way of answers.
Tim O'Brien
#78. 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
#79. You're never more alive than when you're almost dead.
Tim O'Brien
#80. In a way I wanted to stop myself. It was cruel, I knew that, but right and wrong were somewhere else.
Tim O'Brien
#81. Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has.
Tim O'Brien
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. Once you're alive, you can't ever be dead.
Tim O'Brien
#85. But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget.
Tim O'Brien
#86. By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths.
Tim O'Brien
#87. 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
#88. I hated him for making me stop hating him
Tim O'Brien
#89. 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
#90. They carried the soldier's greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. 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.
Tim O'Brien
#91. There was the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.
Tim O'Brien
#92. Most of the things in 'The Things They Carried' didn't happen to me. Ninety-five percent of it's invented. It's not what occurred.
Tim O'Brien
#93. 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
#94. In books or films, it is desirable to have a climactic battle scene, but the world does not operate in those gross dramatic terms. In Vietnam, there was a general aimlessness, not just in the physical sense, but beyond that in the moral and ethical sense.
Tim O'Brien
#96. 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
#97. I showed up in October 1946, part of an early surge that would become a great nationwide baby boom. My sister Kathy was born a year later.
Tim O'Brien
#98. How crazy it was that people who were so incredibly alive could get so incredibly dead
Tim O'Brien
#99. 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
#100. Love, as wonderful and horrible as it is, has at its center a kind of pitiful humor.
Tim O'Brien
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