Tim O'Brien Quotes

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. 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. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.”

— Tim O'Brien

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

— Tim O'Brien

“The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.”

— 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

But this too is true: stories can save us.

— 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

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

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

— Tim O'Brien

“What do you do when you get a draft notice and you think a war is wrong? And I struggled with that for months prior to my being inducted into the army, and I'm still struggling with it, 40 years later.”

— 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

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

— Tim O'Brien

“When a man died, there had to be blame. Jimmy Cross understood this. You could blame the war, You could blame the idiots who made the war. You could blame Kiowa for going to it. You could blame the rain. You could blame the river. You could blame the field, the mud, the climate. You could blame the enemy. You could blame the mortar rounds. You could blame people who were too lazy to read a newspaper, who were bored by the daily body counts, who switched channels at the mention of politics. You could blame whole nations. You could blame God. You could blame the munitions makers or Karl Marx or a trick of fate of an old man in Omaha who forgot to vote.”

— Tim O'Brien

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

— Tim O'Brien

We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it and guard it and hold it forever inaccessible.

— Tim O'Brien

“The town could not talk, and would not listen. "How'd you like to hear about the war?" he might have asked, but the place could only blink and shrug. It had no memory, therefore no guilt. The taxes got paid and the votes got counted and the agencies of government did their work briskly and politely. It was a brisk, polite town. It did not know shit about shit, and did not care to know.”

— Tim O'Brien

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

— Tim O'Brien

“There was the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.”

— Tim O'Brien

“Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel-the spiritual texture-of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity.”

— Tim O'Brien

“What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.
I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.”

— 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

CEASE FIRE,' Captain Johansen shouted. 'Cease fire, what's wrong with you guys? Stop wasting the goddamn ammo. CEASE FIRE!'
Cease fire,' the lieutenants hollered.
Cease fire,' the platoon sergeants hollered.
Cease the goddamn fire,' shouted the squad leaders.
That,' I told Barney, 'is the chain of command.

— Tim O'Brien

There should be a law, I though. If you support a war, if you think it's worth the price, that's fine, but you he to put your own precious fluids on the line. You have to head for the front and hook up with an infantry unit and help spill the blood. And you have to bring along your wife, or your kids, or your lover. A law, I thought.

— Tim O'Brien

“What happened, and what might have happened?”

— 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

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

— Tim O'Brien

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

— Tim O'Brien

“Still there was so much to say. How the rain never stopped. How the cold worked into your bones. Sometimes the bravest thing on earth was to sit through the night and feel the cold in your bones. Courage was not always a matter of yes or no. Sometimes it came in degrees, like the cold; sometimes you were very brave up to a point and then beyond that point you were not so brave. In certain situations you could do incredible things, you could advance toward enemy fire, but in other situations, which were not nearly so bad, you had trouble keeping your eyes open. Sometimes, like that night in the shit field, the difference between courage and cowardice was something small and stupid.”

— Tim O'Brien

“Mitchell sanders was sitting under a banyan tree and using a thumbnail to pry off all the body lice, working slowly, carefully depositing them in a USO envelope. When he was done he sealed the envelope, wrote 'Free' in the right hand corner, and sent it to his draft board in ohio.”

— Tim O'Brien

“I drank some chocolate milk and then lay down on the sofa in my "living" room, not really sad, just floating; trying to imagine what it was to be dead. Nothing much came to me. I remember closing my eyes and whispering her name, trying to make her come back. As we stared at each other, neither of us moving, I felt some ... thing go shut in my heart while something else swung open”

— Tim O'Brien

“Her white skin and those dark brown eyes and the way she always smiled at the world - always, it seemed - as if her face had been designed that way. The smile never went away.”

— Tim O'Brien

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

— Tim O'Brien

“There it is, they'd say. Over and over-there it is, my friend, there it is
-as if the repetition itself were an act of poise, a balance between crazy
and almost crazy, knowing without going, there it is, which meant be
cool, let it ride, because Oh yeah, man, you can't change what can't be
changed, there it is, there it absolutely and positively and fucking well is.”

— Tim O'Brien

Anyways, the guys try to be cool. They just lie there and groove, but after a while they start hearing - you won't believe this - they hear chamber music. They hear violins and cellos. They hear this terrific mama-san soprano. Then after a while they hear gook opera and and a glee club and the Haiphong Boys Choir and a barbershop quartet and and all kinds of wierd chanting and Buddha-Buddha stuff. All the whole time, in the background, there's stil that cocktail party going on. All these different voices. Not human voices, though. Because it's the mountains. Follow me? The rock, it's TALKING. And the fog, too, and the grass and the goddamn mongooses. Everything talks. The trees talk politics, the monnkeys talk religion. The whole country. Vietnam. The place talks. It talks. Understand? Nam - it truly TALKS.

— Tim O'Brien

“Money was never a problem, passports were never required. There were always new places to dance.”

— Tim O'Brien

“A nine-year-old girl, just a kid, and yet there was something ageless in her eyes- not a child, not an adult - just an ongoing everness, that same pinprick of absolute lasting light that I see today in my own eyes as Timmy smiles at Tim from the graying photographs of that time.”

— Tim O'Brien

“If you weren't humping, you were waiting. I remember the monotony. Digging foxholes. Slapping mosquitoes. The sun and the heat and the endless paddies. Even in the deep bush, where you could die any number of ways, the war was nakedly and aggressively boring. But it was a strange boredom. It was boredom with a twist, the kind of boredom that caused stomach disorders. You'd be sitting at the top of a high hill, the flat paddies stretching out below, and the day would be calm and hot and utterly vacant, and you'd feel the boredom dripping inside you like a leaky faucet, except it wasn't water, it was a sort of acid, and with each little droplet you'd feel the stuff eating away at important organs. You'd try to relax. You'd uncurl your fists and let your thoughts go. Well, you'd think, this isn't so bad. And right then you'd hear gunfire behind you and your nuts would fly up into your throat and you'd be squealing pig squeals. That kind of boredom. I”

— Tim O'Brien

“How do you generalize? 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. The truths are contradictory.”

— Tim O'Brien

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

— Tim O'Brien

“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.”

— Tim O'Brien

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

— Tim O'Brien

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

— Tim O'Brien

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

— 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

“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

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

— 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

If I see a phrase that strikes me as ugly, I'll delete it. Or, if I find a way to say something a bit more freshly than it was expressed originally, I'll do it. Ultimately, you want to try to leave behind the best possible paragraph or sentence.

— Tim O'Brien

“Sure, best seller. I'd love to knock Stephen King off the top of the list. I know I won't, but, after all, I spend my life inventing a different reality.”

— Tim O'Brien

“Why do fairy tales exist, and why do movies exist? Why do novels exist? There has to be a reason for it; otherwise, none of these things would be there.”

— Tim O'Brien

“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.”

— Tim O'Brien