Tim O'Brien > Quotes

“when you listened to one of his stories, you’d find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“I live in my head all day long and the world is a little dreamy.”
― Tim O'Brien

“He didn’t plan much—just the basics. Boyd would rob the bank on a Saturday, leave a false trail into Mexico, then head home to attend to things he should have attended to long ago.”
― Tim O'Brien, America Fantastica

“They marched for the sake of the march. They plodded along slowly, dumbly, leaning forward against the heat, unthinking, all blood and bone, simple grunts, soldiering with their legs, toiling up the hills and down into the paddies and across the rivers and up again and down, just humping, one step and then the next and then another, but no volition, no will, because it was automatic, it was anatomy, and the war was entirely a matter of posture and carriage, the hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility. Their principles were in their feet. Their calculations were biological. They had no sense of strategy or mission. They searched the villages without knowing what to look for, not caring, kicking over jars of rice, frisking children and old men, blowing tunnels, sometimes setting fires and sometimes not, then forming up and moving on to the next village, then other villages, where it would always be the same.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“There should be a law: If you support a war, you must go. And your children must go. Otherwise you’re a hypocrite and will be imprisoned for murderous hypocrisy.”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“tell the truth,’ Kathleen can say, ‘did you ever kill anybody?’ And I can say, honestly, ‘Of course not.’ Or I can say, honestly, ‘Yes’” (page 180). How can both of these contradictory responses be true? What is truth—to both Tim O’Brien the narrator and Tim O’Brien the author? Consider the distinction between “story truth” and “happening truth,” which O’Brien develops in the story “Good Form.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“You just don't know,' she said. 'You hide in this little fortress, behind wire and sandbags, and you don't know... Sometimes I want to eat this place. The whole country - the dirt, the death - I just want to swallow it and have it there inside me. That's how I feel. It's like this appetite. I get scared sometimes - lots of times - but it's not bad. You know? I feel close to myself. When I'm out there at night, I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving, my skin and my 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. You can't feel like that anywhere else.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Afterward, when the firing ended, they would blink and peek up. They would touch their bodies, feelings shame, then quickly hiding it. They would force themselves to stand. As if in slow motion, frame by frame, the world would take on the old logic - absolute silence, then the wind, then sunlight, then voices. It was the burden of being alive.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Henry Dobbins made the washing motion with his hands.
"You're right," he said. "All you can do is be nice. Treat them decent, you know?”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Inside the body, or beyond the body, there is something absolute and unchanging.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Общим был груз их памяти. Одни несли то, на что не хватало сил у других. Бывало, несли друг друга, если кто-нибудь был ранен или выбивался из сил. Переносили недомогания.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“They were signed Love, Martha, but Lieutenant Cross understood that Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant. At”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“The Vietnamese knew many of these subhamlets by names different from those indicated on US topographic maps of the area . . . For example, the subhamlet identified on the topographic map as My Lai (4) is actually named Thuan Yen.38”
― Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

“How does its discussion of morality fit into the larger discussion of wars and our world today?”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Later on this fat bird colonel comes up and asks what the hell happened out there. What'd they hear? Why all the ordnance? The man's ragged out, he gets down tight on their case. I mean, they spent six trillion dollars on firepower, and this fatass colonel wants answers, he wants to know what the fuckin' story is.
'But the guys don't say zip. They just look at him for a while, sort of funny like, sort of amazed, and the whole war is right there in that stare. It says everything you can't ever say. It says, man, you got wax in your ears. It says, poor bastard, you'll never know - wrong frequency - you don't even want to hear this. Then they salute the fucker and walk away, because certain stories you don't ever tell.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“He was realistic about it. there was that new hardness in his stomach. He loved her but he hated her.
No more fantasies, he told himself.
Henceforth, when he thought about Martha, it would be only to think that she belonged elsewhere. He would shut down the daydreams. This was not Mount Sebastian, it was another world, where there were no pretty poems or midterm exams, a place where men died because of carelessness and gross stupidity. Kiowa was right. Boom-down, and you were dead, never partly dead.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Trust your own story. Get the hell out of the way and let it tell itself”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

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

“He was just a kid at war, in love.”
― 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”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“I feel close to myself. When I'm out there at night, I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving, my skin and my 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. You
can't feel like that anywhere else.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“The fog made things seem hollow and unattached. He tried not to think about Ted Lavender, but then he was thinking how fast it was, no dram, down and dead, and how it was hard to feel anything except surprise. It seemed unchristian. He wished he could find some great sadness, or even anger, but the emotion wasn't there and he couldn't make it happen. Mostly he felt pleased to be alive.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Делать обобщения относительно войны - все равно, что делать обобщения относительно мира. Почти все правда. Почти все вымысел. Странность войны в том, что вы никогда не будете живы больше, чем когда находились одной ногой на том свете. Вы различаете то, что имеет значение. С чистого листа, как в первый раз, вы любите лишь лучшее в себе и в мире, все, что может быть потеряно. В час ночи вы сидите в своей ячейке и наслаждаетесь видом широкой реки, становящейся розовато красной, и горами позади нее; хотя утром вы должны будете пересечь эту реку и идти в горы и делать ужасные вещи и, возможно, умереть, даже так, вы получаете удовольствие от изучения изумительных цветов реки, вы чувствуете удивление и трепет во время заката, у вас сильно щемит в груди от мысли, каким мог бы быть мир и каким он всегда будет, но не сейчас.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“You will never explain your tricks [to an audience], for no matter how clever the means, the explanation disappoints the desire to believe in something beyond natural causes, and admiration for cleverness is a poor substitute for the delight of wonderment.”
― Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

“Looking back after twenty years, I sometimes wonder if the events of that summer didn't happen in some other dimension, a place where your life exists before you've lived it, and where it goes afterward.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“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

“Once you're alive", she'd say, "you can't ever be dead.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“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

“When the boy hopped away, Azar clucked his tongue and said, 'War's a bitch.' He shook his head sadly. 'One leg, for Crissake. Some poor fucker ran out of ammo.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried