"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 (The Things They Carried)

"That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth."
— Tim O'Brien

"A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen."
— Tim O'Brien

""Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth.""
— 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 (The Things They Carried)

"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

"A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written."
— Tim O'Brien

"It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"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 (The Things They Carried)

"Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories ar 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 (The Things They Carried)

"Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. 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 are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story."
— Tim O'Brien

"A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries."
— 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 (The Things They Carried)

"...you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not."
— Tim O'Brien

"Everything was such a damned nice idea when it was an idea."
— Tim O'Brien (Northern Lights)

"All that peace, man, if felt so good it hurt. I want to hurt it back."
— Tim O'Brien

"In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. .. The pictures get jumbled, you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. 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 are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"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 Things They Carried)

"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."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"You don't know. When I'm out there at night I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving, my skin and fingernails, everything, it's like I'm full of electricity and I'm glowing in the dark - I'm on fire almost - I'm burning away into nothing - but it doesn't matter because I know exactly who I am."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"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 (The Things They Carried)

"When a mad 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 (The Things They Carried)

"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. "
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end..."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"With a hangover and with fear, it is difficult to put a helmet on your head."
— Tim O'Brien (If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home)

"It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do. "
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"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."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"'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 (If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home)

"[Y]ou can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"...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 (The Things They Carried)

"I survived, but it's not a happy ending."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"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 (The Things They Carried)

"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 (The Things They Carried)

"Together we understood what terror was: you're not human anymore. You're a shadow. You slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted to believed in. You know you're about to die. And it's not a movie and you aren't a hero and all you can do is whimper and wait. "
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"But in a story, which is a type of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"A miracle to confound natural law, a baffling reversal of the inevitable consequences . . . a miracle. . . . An act of high imagination -- daring and lurid and impossible. Yes, a cartoon of the mind."
— Tim O'Brien (Going After Cacciato)

"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 (Northern Lights)

"They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"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 (The Things They Carried)

"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."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. 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 are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. 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 are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"What happened, and what might have happened?"
— Tim O'Brien (Going After Cacciato)

"Yes, the issue was courage. It always had been, even as a kid. Things scared him. He couldn't help it. Noise scared him, dark scared him. Tunnels scared him: the time he almost won the Silver Star for valor. But the real issue was courage. It had nothing to do with the Silver Star...Oh, he would've liked winning it, true, but that wasn't the issue. He would've liked showing the medal to his father, the heavy feel of it, looking his father in the eye to show he had been brave, but even that wasn't the real issue. The real issue was the power of will to defeat fear. A matter of figuring a way to do it. Somehow working his way into that secret chamber of the human heart, where, in tangles, lay the circuitry for all that was possible, the full range of what a man might be. He believed, like Doc Peret, that somewhere inside each man is a biological center for the exercise of courage, a piece of tissue that might be touched and sparked and made to respond, a chemical maybe, or a lone chromosome that when made to fire would produce a blaze of valor that even the biles could not extinguish. A filament, a fuse, that if ignited would release the full energy of what might be. There was a Silver Star twinkling somewhere inside him."
— 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 true war story nothing is ever absolutely true."
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)

"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