Tim O'Brien Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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They were afraid of dying but even more afraid to show it.

Tim O'Brien
The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.

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

Tim O'Brien
I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
You were a treasonous pussy if you had second thoughts about killing and dying for plain and simple reasons.

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

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

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

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
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
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
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.

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
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
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.

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
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.

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
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