Tim O'Brien Quotes

65 Sourced Quotes

War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.

Tim O'Brien
In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.

Tim O'Brien
If a story seems moral, do not believe it. 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
I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.

Tim O'Brien
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
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 ar for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

Tim O'Brien
They were afraid of dying but even more afraid to show it.

Tim O'Brien
Any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. the grass, the soil — everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble.

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

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
There were times in my life when I couldn't feel much, not sadness or pity or passion, and somehow I blamed this place for what I had become, and I blamed it for taking away the person I had once been.

Tim O'Brien
Right then, with the shore so close, I understood that I would not do what I should do. I would not swim away from my hometown and my country and my life. I would not be brave.

Tim O'Brien
Intellect had run up against emotion. My conscience told me to run, yet some irrational and powerful force was resisting, like a weight pushing me toward the war. What it came to, stupidly, was a sense of shame. Hot, stupid shame. I did not want people to think badly of me.

Tim O'Brien
At night, when I couldn't sleep, I'd sometimes carry on silent arguments with those people. I'd be screaming at them, telling them how much I detested their blind, thoughtless, automatic acquiescence to it all, their simpleminded patriotism, their prideful ignorance, their love-it-or-leave it platitudes, how they were sending me off to fight a war they didn't understand and didn't want to understand.

Tim O'Brien
He had an opinion of himself, I think, that was too high for his own good. Or maybe it was the reverse. Maybe it was a low opinion that he kept trying to erase.

Tim O'Brien
It was the spirit world. Vietnam. Ghosts and graveyards. I arrived in-country a year after John Wade, in 1969, and walked exactly the ground he walked, in and around Pinkville, through the villages of Thuan yen and My Khe and Co Luy. I know what happened that day. I know how it happened. I know why. It was the sunlight. It was the wickedness that soaks into your blood and slowly heats up and begins to boil. Frustration, partly. Rage, partly. The enemy was invisible. They were ghosts.

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

Tim O'Brien
A fat little kid doing magic in front of a stand-up mirror. 'Hey, kiddo, that's a good one,' his father could've said, but for reasons unknown, reasons mysterious, the words never got spoken. He had wanted to be loved. And to be loved he had practiced deception. He had hidden the bad things. He had tricked up his own life. Only for love. Only to be loved.

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

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

Tim O'Brien
You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty.

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
'Well, I still don't get it,' she said. 'The way you talk, it sounds calculating or something. Too cold. Planning every tiny detail.' 'And that's bad?' 'No. Not exactly.' 'What then?' She made a shifting motion with her shoulders. 'I don't know, it just seem strange, sort of. How you've figured everything out, all the angles, except what it's for.' 'For us,' he said. 'I love you, Kath.' 'But it feels — I shouldn't say this — it feels manipulating.'... He talked about leading a good life, doing good things for the world. Yet even as he spoke, John realized he was not telling the full truth. Politics was manipulation.

Tim O'Brien
I would go to the war — I would kill and maybe die — because I was embarrassed not to. That was the sad thing. And so I sat in the bow of the boat and cried.

Tim O'Brien
To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true.

Tim O'Brien
I remember opening the letter, scanning the first few lines, feeling the blood go thick behind my eyes. I remember a sound in my head. It wasn't thinking, just a silent howl. A million things all at once — I was too good for this war. Too smart, too compassionate, too everything. It couldn't happen. I was above it.

Tim O'Brien
It's not just the embarrassment of tears. That's part of it, no doubt, but what embarrasses me much more, and always will, is the paralysis that took my heart. A moral freeze: I couldn't decide, I couldn't act, I couldn't comport myself with even a pretense of modest human dignity.

Tim O'Brien
They carried the soldier's greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.

Tim O'Brien