Tim O'Brien Quotes

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

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

They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.

Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.

Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth.

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

[Y]ou can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

Why do our politicians put warnings on cigarette packs and not on their own foreheads?

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

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.

It's a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn't felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid.

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

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

A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What happened, and what might have happened?

A lot like yesterday, a lot like never.

I was a coward. I went to the war.

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

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

He wished he could've explained some of this. How he had been braver than he ever thought possible, but how he had not been so brave as he wanted to be. The distinction was important.

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

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

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

Imagination, like reality, has its limits.

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

And as a writer now, I want to save Linda's life. Not her body--her life.

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.

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

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

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

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.

A true war story is never moral.

Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has.

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

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.

Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.

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

Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones - THAT kind of love.

...his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered.

... when he kissed her, she received the kiss without returning it, her eyes wide open, not afraid, not a virgin's eyes, just flat and uninvolved.

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

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