Tim O'Brien > Quotes

“I hope so. Except I'm afraid to look at myself. Literally. I can't even look at my own eyes in the mirror, not for long. I'm afraid I won't be there.”
― Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

“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, The Things They Carried

“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

“In a true war story, if there’s a moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth. You can’t tease it out. You can’t extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there’s nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe “Oh.” True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis. For”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Large effects might come from small causes.”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“Then he shrugged and gave me a stare that lasted all day.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. […]And 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

“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.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“...I asked her what it was like to be dead. Apparently Linda thought that was a silly question. She smiled and said, "Do I look dead?”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“The object of storytelling, like the object of magic, is not to explain or to resolve, but rather to create and to perform miracles of the imagination. To extend the boundaries of the mysterious. To push into the unknown in pursuit of still other unknowns. To reach into one's heart, down into that place where the stories are, bringing up the mystery of oneself.”
― Tim O'Brien

“but he just slipped the pantyhose over his nose and breathed deep and let the magic do its work.
It turned us into a platoon of believers. You don't dispute facts.
But then, near the end of October, his girlfriend dumped him. It was a hard blow. Dobbins went quiet for a while, staring down at her letter, then after a time he took out the stockings and tied them around his neck as a comforter.
'No sweat,' he said. 'The magic doesn't go away.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“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

“Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct. They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds. They carried the land itself—Vietnam, the place, the soil—a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. 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, The Things They Carried

“Mythomania—or plain old lying—infiltrated churches, schools, hair salons, corporate boardrooms, courtrooms, and nightclubs. Smith & Wesson received seven hundred write-in votes in Topeka’s mayoral race. The Library of Congress was under pressure to ban its copy of the Gutenberg Bible for flaunting the word fornicate and the first two syllables of the word sodomy. Speechwriters jumped aboard. Nannies and city councilmen in Prescott, Arizona, denounced the devil’s codex implanted in the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution; NASA was burning down forests in Idaho; the Census Bureau was refusing to count people with blue eyes; Grover Cleveland’s skull was buried under the Watergate complex; vigilantes roamed the nighttime streets of Fargo in search of Democrats and Kenyans; Columbine was a CIA operation; Pearl Harbor never happened; corporations were people; Amazon was a distinguished citizen. In Fulda, where the Truth Tellers were led by Dink O’Neill, his brother Chub, and Chamber of Commerce President Earl Fenstermacher, the burdens of seeding fake unfake news kept them hopping through the hot days of September 2019. Boyd Halverson’s contributions were sorely missed. “Boyd had a knack for it,” Chub told Earl after their bimonthly Kiwanis brunch. “I don’t know how we’ll replace him.”
― Tim O'Brien, America Fantastica

“He got in his car and rolled down the window. 'Make me out to be a good guy, okay? Brave and handsome, all that stuff. Best platoon leader ever.' He hesitated for a second. 'And do me a favor. Don't mention anything about -'
'No,' I said, 'I won't.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“They carried their own lives. The pressures were enormous.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Они несли собственные жизни. На них чудовищно давили погода и стресс. На послеполуденной жаре они снимали каски и бронежилеты, шли налегке, что было опасно, но помогало сбросить напряжение. Часто на марше они от чего-то избавлялись. Удобства ради, они выкидывали сухие пайки, подрывали гранаты и «клейморы» — наплевать, ведь к ночи вертолеты привезут еще, а потом пару дней спустя еще и еще: свежие арбузы и ящики с боеприпасами, солнечными очками и шерстяными свитерами… Неистощимость ресурсов поражала: фейерверки на четвертое июля, крашеные яйца на Пасху. Это же великий американский военный бюджет: дары науки и конвейеров, консервных заводов и арсеналов Хартфорда, лесов Миннесоты и бескрайних полей пшеницы и кукурузы… Всё это они несли, как грузовые поезда. Они несли это на своих спинах и плечах, и при всех двусмысленностях Вьетнама, при всех его загадках и переменных, неизменно оставалась как минимум одна непреложная истина: им вечно будет что нести.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Garden of Evil. Over here, man, every sin’s real fresh and original.”
― Tim O'Brien

“A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Sometimes the bravest thing on earth was to sit through the night and feel the cold in your bones.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“But lying there in the dark, they also understood that they had sacrificed some essential part of themselves for the possibilities of an ambiguous future. It was the guilt of a bad wager. They understood this, too, and they felt the consequences.”
― Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

“Quickly, trying not to feel anything, we went through the kid's pockets. I remember wishing I had gloves. It wasn't the blood I hated; it was the deadness”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“I stood with my arms folded, feeling the grip of sentiment and time.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Sert bir dil kullanırlardı o korkunç yumuşaklığı kapsayabilmek için. Nallandı derlerdi. Göçtü, işerken şişlendi. Acımasızlık değildi, sahne duruşuydu sadece. Oyuncuydular. Biri öldüğünde tam ölmek gibi değildi, çünkü tuhaf bir biçimde senaryo gereğiydi ve repliklerini ezbere biliyorlardı sanki, ironi katılmış trajedi. Ve bu yüzden farklı adlar yakıştırmayı severlerdi, ölüm gerçeğini parçalamak için. Cesetleri tekmelerlerdi. Baş parmakları keserlerdi. Homurtulu bir argoyla konuşurlardı.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“and for all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.”
― 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, The Things They Carried

“A morbid irony, Jan realized, but slaughter had given her a life. Napalm had made her happy. She hoped the war would never end.”
― Tim O'Brien, July, July

“Late at night, when the Greenies were out on ambush, the whole rain forest seemed to stare in at them—a watched feeling—and a couple of times they almost saw her sliding through the shadows. Not quite, but almost. She had crossed to the other side. She was part of the land. She was wearing her culottes, her pink sweater, and a necklace of human tongues. She was dangerous. She was ready for the kill.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried / In The Lake Of The Woods

“To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“I did not look on my work as therapy, and still don't. Yet when I received Normal Bowker's letter, it occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried