Tim O'brien Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about Tim O'brien
Tim O'brien Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Tim O'brien quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe Oh.
— Tim O'Brien
By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths.
— Tim O'Brien
I grew up with the Gene Kelly look at war. The cheerful kind of stories you tell about a horrendous war.
— Tim O'Brien
Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is.
— Tim O'Brien
Laughter does not deny pain. Laughter - like a wail - acknowledges and replies to pain.
— Tim O'Brien
There was the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.
— Tim O'Brien
Let the story tell itself.
— Tim O'Brien
Writing doesn't get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write.
— Tim O'Brien
They would get their shit together, and keep it together, and maintain it neatly and in good working order.
— Tim O'Brien
A bullet can kill the enemy, but a bullet can also produce an enemy, depending on whom that bullet strikes.
— Tim O'Brien
That you don't make war without knowing why.
— 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
A true war story is never moral.
— Tim O'Brien
How crazy it was that people who were so incredibly alive could get so incredibly dead
— Tim O'Brien
A lot like yesterday, a lot like never.
— Tim O'Brien
In a way I wanted to stop myself. It was cruel, I knew that, but right and wrong were somewhere else.
— 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
I hated the draft, but at the same time, it's something that made every American take war seriously.
— Tim O'Brien
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
Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth.
— Tim O'Brien
That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.
— Tim O'Brien
I'm young and happy. I'll never die.
— Tim O'Brien
It's sad when you learn you're not much of a hero.
— Tim O'Brien
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
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
Stories can save us.
— Tim O'Brien
Precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated.
— 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
I carry the memories of the ghosts of a place called Vietnam - the people of Vietnam, my fellow soldiers.
— Tim O'Brien
Once you're alive, you can't ever be dead.
— Tim O'Brien
She'd say amazing things sometimes. "Once you're alive," she'd say, "you cant ever be dead.
— Tim O'Brien
Imagination is a killer.
— Tim O'Brien
Money was never a problem, passports were never required. There were always new places to dance.
— Tim O'Brien
But this too is true: stories save us.
— Tim O'Brien
Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons.
— Tim O'Brien
Once someone's dead you can't make them undead.
— Tim O'Brien
I have tried, of course, to be faithful to the evidence. Yet evidence is not truth. It is only evident.
— Tim O'Brien
I hated him for making me stop hating him
— Tim O'Brien
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
The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, repaying itself over and over.
— 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
What happened, and what might have happened?
— Tim O'Brien
But this too is true: stories can save us.
— Tim O'Brien
We'll find new stuff to want.
— Tim O'Brien
And now it is time for a final act of courage. I urge you: March proudly into your own dream.
— Tim O'Brien
With no draft, the only people who went to war were those who wanted to, or at least those who wanted to join the military.
— 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
Everyone acts stupid at some time in order to be loved.
— Tim O'Brien
Can a word stop your heart as surely as arsenic?
— Tim O'Brien
But in a story I can steal her soul.
— 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
Why do our politicians put warnings on cigarette packs and not on their own foreheads?
— Tim O'Brien
When your afraid,reallyafraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world.
— Tim O'Brien
Zapped while zipping.
— 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
