Top 100 Tim O'leary Quotes
#1. Hear that quiet, man?' he said. 'That quiet - just listen. There's your moral.
Tim O'Brien
#3. 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
#4. I personally own six or seven thousand books, so I - and I certainly don't want to see them go away.
Tim O'Reilly
#5. 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
#6. Don't throw away luck on little stuff. Save it up.
Tim O'Brien
#7. I heard water evaporating. I heard the tick of my own biology.
Tim O'Brien
#8. The future is always scary to those who cling to the past.
Tim O'Reilly
#9. That you don't make war without knowing why.
Tim O'Brien
#10. 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
#12. So many technologies start out with a burst of idealism, democratization, and opportunity, and over time, they close down and become less friendly to entrepreneurship, to innovation, to new ideas. Over time, the companies that become dominant take more out of the ecosystem than they put back in.
Tim O'Reilly
#13. My original business model - I actually wrote this down - was 'interesting work for interesting people.'
Tim O'Reilly
#14. 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
#15. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever.
Tim O'Brien
#16. Why do our politicians put warnings on cigarette packs and not on their own foreheads?
Tim O'Brien
#17. I hated the draft, but at the same time, it's something that made every American take war seriously.
Tim O'Brien
#18. 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
#20. 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
#21. Taking the sweatshirt, he raised it to his face and sniffed the bloodstains left on it.
Tim O'Rourke
#22. What is love, for God's sake, if not the most distilled obsession?
Tim O'Brien
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. The presence of danger has a way of making you feel fully awake.
Tim O'Brien
#26. '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
#27. Every Hero Becomes a Bore at last." Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tim O. Casey
#28. 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
#29. Obscurity is a bigger problem for authors than piracy.
Tim O'Reilly
#31. Everything was such a damned nice idea when it was an idea.
Tim O'Brien
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. I know people back in London who would sell themselves for a meal like that tonight."
Thaddeus Looked at her, his face impassive and said, "I'm sorry; perhaps we should Fed-Ex it to them
Tim O'Rourke
#36. (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
#37. I live in my head all day long and the world is a little dreamy.
Tim O'Brien
#38. What new technology does is create new opportunities to do a job that customers want done.
Tim O'Reilly
#39. There are more than 21 eBook channels already. Authors can't possibly get to these and do what they do best.
Tim O'Reilly
#40. Share what you do profusely, because it will be remixed by others into something new, rich and strange.
Tim O'Reilly
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#45. 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
#46. Summer lightning made it seem that flickering white-hot wires were turning in the terribly blue sky just above the horizon, and the recent storms had driven in toward shore hundreds of gigantic Portuguese man-o'-wars that now hung below the surface of the water like big malignant pearls.
Tim Powers
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. I have tried, of course, to be faithful to the evidence. Yet evidence is not truth. It is only evident.
Tim O'Brien
#54. While the willingness of the ancient Greeks to sacrifice their lives for glory brings tears to my eyes, I cannot ultimately condone the choice of Achilles.
Tim O'Reilly
#55. I have to say there are a lot of me-too products and companies. Yet another social network, of the 15th flavor - that's common in every new technology revolution. There are imitators who have marginal improvements.
Tim O'Reilly
#56. We don't market products narrowly. We market big stories about the industry, things that matter to a lot of people.
Tim O'Reilly
#57. Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth.
Tim O'Brien
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. It's hard to make something as large as a government change. It's a little bit like building the transcontinental railroad.
Tim O'Reilly
#62. 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
#63. At O'Reilly, the way we think about our business is that we're not a publisher; we're not a conference producer; we're a company that helps change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.
Tim O'Reilly
#64. No matter your sector, chances are that people are already twittering about your products, your brand, your company or at least your industry.
Tim O'Reilly
#65. 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
#66. I grew up with the Gene Kelly look at war. The cheerful kind of stories you tell about a horrendous war.
Tim O'Brien
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. The problem for most artists isn't piracy, it's obscurity.
Tim O'Reilly
#70. Did I choose this life of illusion? Don't be mad. My bed was made, I just lied in it.
Tim O'Brien
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. Proprietary software grew up, starting really in the 1980s, as an alternative and that became the dominant model with the rise of companies like Microsoft and Oracle and the like.
Tim O'Reilly
#76. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. An invention has to make sense in the world it finishes in, not in the world it started.
Tim O'Reilly
#81. Pursue something so important that even if you fail, the world is better off with you having tried.
Tim O'Reilly
#82. The network is opening up some amazing possibilities for us to reinvent content, reinvent collaboration.
Tim O'Reilly
#83. 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
#84. To be memorable and to have dramatic impact, informational detail must function actively within the dynamic of a story.
Tim O'Brien
#85. A key function of a publishing brand is the bestowal of status by who and what you pay attention to.
Tim O'Reilly
#86. I survived, but it's not a happy ending.
Tim O'Brien
#87. [O]nce you reject evidence as a source of knowledge, you don't gotta believe nothin' you don't like.
Tim Minchin
#88. 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
#89. A book is always a dialogue with other readers and other books.
Tim O'Reilly
#90. They were afraid of dieing, but they were even more afraid to show it.
Tim O'Brien
#91. I think that companies always become complacent, over time. Or most companies, that is.
Tim O'Reilly
#92. 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
#93. It's very hard to articulate the things that are important about writing.
Tim O'Brien
#94. Now I really have it all. I've been given some bullshit in my time, but that....
Tim O'Rourke
#95. One of O'Reilly's advantages is that we have a network of thousands of user groups to whom we give free books, to whom we advertise our products, and they spread the word. If you don't have that database, it's hard to get the attention of the market.
Tim O'Reilly
#96. Each morning, despite the unknowns, they made their legs move.
Tim O'Brien
#97. 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
#98. People don't care about books. They care about ideas.
Tim O'Reilly
#99. 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
#100. Do you know what vengence is, Tim? It is a dark mirror in which we cannot see ourselves.
Patrick O'Leary
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