Tim O'Brien > Quotes

“During that long summer I'd been over and over the various arguments, all the pros and cons, and it was no longer a question that could be decided by an act of pure reason. Intellect had come up against emotion. My conscience told me to run, but some irrational and powerful force was resisting, like a weight pushing me toward the war. What it came down to, stupidly, was a sense of shame. Hot, stupid shame. I did not want people to think badly of me. Not my parents, not my brother and sister, not even the folks down at the Gobbler Cafe. I was ashamed to be there at the Tip Top Lodge. I was ashamed of my conscience, ashamed to be doing the right thing.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“he had been braver than he ever thought possible, but how he had not been so brave as he wanted to”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“There are two Santa Monicas. One is a fairy tale of spangled gowns and improbable breasts and faces from the tabloids, of big money and fixed noses and strung-out voice teachers and heiresses on skateboards and even bigger big money; of movie stars you thought were dead and look dead; of terraced apartment buildings cascading down perilous yellow bluffs toward the sea; of Olympic swimmers and hip-hop hit men and impresarios of salvation and twenty-six-year-old agents backing out of deals in the lounge bar at Shutters; of yoga masters and street magicians; of porn kings and fast cars and microdosing prophets and shuck-and-jive evangelists and tattooed tycoons and considerably bigger big money; of Sudanese busboys with capped teeth and eight-by-ten glossies in their back pockets; of Ivy League panhandlers, teenage has-beens, home-run kinds in diamonds and fur coats, daughters of sultans, sons of felons, widows of the silver screen, and the kind of meaningless big money that has forgotten what money is.

There is that.

But start at the pier and head southeast until you reach a neighborhood of tidy, more or less identical stucco houses separated by fourteen feet of scorched grass. In a number of these homes, you will find families, or the descendants of families, who have lived here since the mid-to-late forties. For them, upscale was a Chevy in the driveway. Mom mixed up Kool-Aid at ten cents a gallon, Pop pushed used cars at a dealership off Wilshire Boulevard, Junior had a paper route, Sis did some weekend babysitting. Nowadays, the house Pop bought for $37,000 will fetch just under two million in a sluggish market, but as Pop loved to say, secretly proud "What kind of house do you buy with the profit? A pup tent? A toolshed in Laguna?”
― Tim O'Brien, America Fantastica

“They would repair the leaks in their eyes.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Could this, he wondered, be I? Instantly, he congratulated himself on the impeccable grammar. Still the journalist. Still civilized, too, because what was grammar if not civilization, or the delegate of civilization, or its last decaying bulwark?”
― Tim O'Brien, America Fantastica

“It was not great mystery, he decided.
In those burned letters Martha had never mentioned the war, except to say, Jimmy, take care of yourself. She wasn't involved. She signed the letters Love, but it wasn't love, and all the fine lines and technicalities did not matter. Virginity was no longer an issue. He hated her. Yes, he did. He hated her. Love, too, but it was a hard, hating kind of love.
The morning came up wet and blurry. Everything seemed part of everything else, the fog and Martha and the deepening rain.
He was a soldier, after all.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“War makes you a man; war makes you dead.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. That's the real obsession. All those stories.

Not bloody stories, necessarily. Happy stories, too, and even a few peace stories.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Иной раз ты способен на подвиг, идешь прямо на вражеский огонь, а после, когда вся обстановка вокруг несравнимо легче, огромных усилий стоит не закрывать глаза. А иногда, как на том поле, грань между отвагой и трусостью определяется нелепостью, ерундой.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“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. After a fight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“It is a crucial moment in a soldier’s life when he is ordered to perform a deed that he finds completely at variance with his own notions of right and good. Probably for the first time, he discovers that an act someone else thinks to be necessary is for him criminal . . . Suddenly the soldier feels himself abandoned and cast off from all security. Conscience has isolated him, and its voice is a warning. If you do this, you will not be at peace with me in the future. You can do it, but you ought not. You must act as a man and not as an instrument of another’s will.54 —J. Glenn Gray (The Warriors)”
― Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

“Sometimes I forgive myself, other times I don't.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“A true war story is never moral.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Among the men there would be grumbling, of course, and maybe worse, because their days would seem longer and their loads heavier, but Lieutenant Jimmy Cross reminded himself that his obligation was not to be loved but to lead. He would dispense with love; it was not now a factor. And if anyone quarreled or complained, he would simply tighten his lips and arrange his shoulders in the correct command posture. He might give a curt little nod. Or he might not. He might just shrug and say, Carry on, then they would saddle up and form into a column and move out toward the villages west of Than Khe.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“They kissed. “Okay,” Dooney said. “Now pay attention. Evil number one, competition. Evil number two, government. So let’s say you’re a respectable, all-American robber baron; you’re sick and tired of all the save-the-water, save-the-whatever EPA types, IRS types, SEC types, DNC types, name your traitor. How can you be a robber baron if you can’t rob anybody?” “Got me,” said Cal. “Retire?” “Uh-uh,” said Dooney. “Think vertical. If you’re fed up with government, you hike up your trousers and throw your hat in the ring. You become the government. You go vertical. You install yourself right up there at the tippy-top of the pyramid. Corporations, Cal—they’re people. Law of the land. Therefore you nominate your corporation for president of the United Capitalist States of America, that’s what you do, you do an acquisition, you buy a subsidiary called the presidency, you install yourself as commander in chief—you install Amazon, you install PS&S and yours truly—because PS&S is a living, breathing, bona fide human being just like you and me and Jeff Bezos—human rights, legal rights—and, bingo, the IRS is your errand boy, the SEC is your own personal masseuse, the EPA is the groundskeeper on that golf course of yours down in Florida, and, hey, if you catch any flack, tough shit, you fire the whistleblower and hire somebody with the sense to do exactly what you want, what PS&S wants, what Amazon and the USA want. You make this country great again. Because you are this country. Because you are great. And if anybody thinks you’re not, fair enough, you buy yourself another subsidiary, you buy a Congress, so then it’s your Congress, the PS&S Congress, and you scare the shit out of anybody who thinks differently. That’s vertical. That’s king of the Monopoly board. That’s queen of Sheba. That’s why the Pilgrims showed up.”
― Tim O'Brien, America Fantastica

“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

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

“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’m not dead. But when I am, it’s like . . . I don’t know, I guess it’s like being inside a book that nobody’s reading.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Now and then, when I tell this story, someone will come up to me afterward and say she liked it. It's always a woman. Usually it's an older woman of kindly temperament and humane politics. She'll explain that as a rule she hates war stories; she can't understand why people want to wallow in all the blood and gore. But this one she liked. The poor baby buffalo, it made her sad. Sometimes, even, there are little tears. What I should do, she'll say, is put it all behind me. Find new stories to tell.
I won't say it but I'll think it.
I'll picture Rat Kiley's 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

“Is silence golden or common stone?”
― Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

“Did you obey your orders?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: What were your orders?
A: Kill anything that breathed.57”
― Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

“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

“He wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt. For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around”
― Tim O'Brien

“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 or an old man in Omaha who forgot to vote.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“The whole world worked by subterfuge and the will to believe.”
― Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

“I remember Norman Bowker and Henry Dobbins playing checkers every evening before dark. It was a ritual for them. They would dig a foxhole and get the board out and play long, silent games as the sky went from pink to purple. The rest of us would sometimes stop by to watch. There was something restful about it, something orderly and reassuring. There were red checkers and black checkers. The playing field was laid out in a strict grid, no tunnels or mountains or jungles. You knew where you stood. You knew the score. The pieces were out on the board, the enemy was visible, you could watch the tactics unfolding into larger strategies. There was a winner and a loser. There were rules.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Мы живем в наших душах как в неизведанных странах, расчистив себе для обитания лишь по маленькой площадке; в душе ближнего мы знаем лишь полоску вдоль нашей с ним границы.

Эдит Уортон. «Пробный камень»”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“The human life is all one thing, like a blade tracing loops on ice: a little kids, a twenty-three-year-old infantry sergeant, a middle-aged writer knowing guilt and sorrow.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Can we not believe that two adults, in love, might resolve to make their own miracle?”
― Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods