Tim O'Brien quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Tim O'Brien

Tim O'Brien Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Tim O'Brien on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

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.

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

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.

But this, too, was a performance.

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.

By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths.

I was a coward. I went to the war.

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

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

You don't have to be in Nam to be in Nam.

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.

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.

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.

You're never more alive than when you're almost dead.

Laughter does not deny pain. Laughter - like a wail - acknowledges and replies to pain.

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

Let the story tell itself.

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

Writing doesn't get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write.

That you don't make war without knowing why.

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

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

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.

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

They sat smoking the dead mans dope until the chopper came

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

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

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

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.

I carry the memories of the ghosts of a place called Vietnam - the people of Vietnam, my fellow soldiers.

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

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

A small, seemingly inconsequential event can determine a life.

A true war story is never moral.

Everything was such a damned nice idea when it was an idea.

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.

Don't throw away luck on little stuff. Save it up.

They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness.

Imagination, like reality, has its limits.

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.

Every dark cloud may well have its silver lining, but I have come to learn that every silver lining has its dark consequences.

Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth.

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

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.

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

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.

I survived, but it's not a happy ending.

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

The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.

If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth.

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.

I'm young and happy. I'll never die.

They were afraid of dieing, but they were even more afraid to show it.

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.

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

Sometimes the bravest thing in the world was to sit through the night and feel the cold in your bones.

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

I learned that moral courage is harder than physical courage.

He hated her. Yes, he did. He hated her. Love, too, but it was a hard, hating kind of love.

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

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

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

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.

Imagination is a killer.

But this too is true: stories save us.

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

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

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.

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

My whole life seemed to spill out into the river, swirling away from me, everything I had ever been or ever wanted to be.

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

But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.

What happened, and what might have happened?

But this too is true: stories can save us.

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

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

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

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

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

A lot like yesterday, a lot like never.

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

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

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

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

It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.

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

They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.

Stories can save us.

There is always the threat of tomorrow's treachery, or next year's treachery, or the treachery implicit in all the tomorrows beyond that.

Everyone acts stupid at some time in order to be loved.

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.

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.

Can a word stop your heart as surely as arsenic?

But in a story I can steal her soul.

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.

When your afraid,reallyafraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world.

Zapped while zipping.

Love, as wonderful and horrible as it is, has at its center a kind of pitiful humor.