Tim O'brien Quotes: 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

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

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

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

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

With a hangover and with fear, it is difficult to put a helmet on your head. — Tim O'Brien

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

Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is. — 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

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

Laughter does not deny pain. Laughter - like a wail - acknowledges and replies to pain. — Tim O'Brien

For me, the way to approach a subject such as Vietnam is through storytelling. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. — Tim O'Brien

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

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

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

Each morning, despite the unknowns, they made their legs move. — Tim O'Brien

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

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

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

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

They sat smoking the dead mans dope until the chopper came — Tim O'Brien

Stories can save us. — Tim O'Brien

Hear that quiet, man?' he said. 'That quiet - just listen. There's your moral. — Tim O'Brien

The greater a man's fear, the greater his potential courage — 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

In Iraq and Afghanistan, our soldiers signed up intentionally. That's a huge difference from the largely conscripted army of my era. — 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

I think I'm a pretty moral guy, a very moral guy, but I'm not perfect. — Tim O'Brien

But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget. — Tim O'Brien

A small, seemingly inconsequential event can determine a life. — Tim O'Brien

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

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

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

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

I hated him for making me stop hating him — Tim O'Brien

Words, too, have genuine substance
mass and weight and specific gravity. — 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

I received my draft notice right after graduation from college and had three months before going into the Army in September to think about it. — Tim O'Brien

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

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

Did I choose this life of illusion? Don't be mad. My bed was made, I just lied in it. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. — 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

Love, as wonderful and horrible as it is, has at its center a kind of pitiful humor. — Tim O'Brien

My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead. — 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

A place where your life exists before you live it, and where it goes afterwards. — Tim O'Brien

I learned that moral courage is harder than physical courage. — Tim O'Brien

He hated her. Yes, he did. He hated her. Love, too, but it was a hard, hating kind of love. — Tim O'Brien

To be memorable and to have dramatic impact, informational detail must function actively within the dynamic of a story. — Tim O'Brien