Tim O'Brien > Quotes

“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. For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“At one point Mitchell Sanders looked at me and said, 'Hey, man, I just realized something.'
'What?'
He wiped his eyes and spoke very quietly, as if awed by his own wisdom.
'Death sucks,' he said.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“The typical load was 25 rounds. But Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried 34 rounds when he was shot and killed outside Than Khe, and he went down under an exceptional burden, more than 20 pounds of ammunition, plus the flak jacket and helmet and rations and water and toilet paper and tranquilizers and all the rest, plus the unweighed fear. He was dead weight. There was no twitching or flopping. Kiowa, who saw it happen, said it was like watching a rock fall, or a big sandbag or something - just boom, then down - not like the movies where the dead guy rolls around and does fancy spins and goes ass over teakettle - not like that, Kiowa said, the poor bastard just flat-fuck fell. Boom. Down.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Could this, he wondered, be I? Instantly, he congratulated himself on the impeccable grammar.”
― Tim O'Brien, America Fantastica

“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

“Stories are for joining the past and the future. Stories are for those late hours of 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 we have here,” Doc said at the start of the fourth week of the peace, “is your basic vacuum. Follow me? A vacuum. Like in emptiness, suction. Can’t have order in a vacuum. For order you got to have substance, matériel. So here we are—nothing to order, no substance. Aimless, that’s”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“They told stories about Ted Lavender's supply of tranquilizers, how the poor guy didn't feel a thing, how incredibly tranquil he was.
There's a moral here, said Mitchell Sanders.
They were waiting for Lavender's chopper, smoking the dead man's dope.
The moral's pretty obvious, Sanders said, and winked. Stay away from drugs. No joke, they'll ruin your day every time.
Cute, said Henry Dobbins.
Mind blower, get it? Talk about wiggy. Nothing left, just blood and brains.
They made themselves laugh.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“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

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

“And right then I submitted.
I would go to war - I would kill and maybe die - because I was embarrassed not to.
That was the sad thing. And so I sat in the bow of the boat and cried.
It was loud now. Loud, hard crying.”
― 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

“Each soldier, he has a different war. Even if it is the same war, it is a different war. Do you see this?”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“They were tough. They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing—these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“War stories. That was what remained: a few stupid war stories, hackneyed and unprofound. Even the lessons were commonplace. It hurts to be shot. Dead men are heavy. Don't seek trouble, it'll find you soon enough. You hear the shot that gets you. Scared to death on the field of battle. Life after death. These were hard lessons, true, but they were lessons of ignorance; ignorant men, trite truths. What remained was simple event. The facts, the physical things. A war like any war. No new messages. Stories that began and ended without transition. No developing drama or tension or direction. No order.”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“Everything talks. The trees talk politics, the monkeys talk religion.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“They were afraid of dying but they were even more afraid to show it.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“They endured. They kept humping. They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“they carried like freight trains; they carried it on their backs and shoulders - 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

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

“So you see,” said Li Van Hgoc as he brought down the periscope and locked it with a silver key, “things may be viewed from many angles. From down below, or from inside out, you often discover entirely new understandings.”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“He enjoyed not being dead. Lying there, Kiowa admired Lieutenant Jimmy Cross's capacity for grief. He wanted to share the man's pain, he wanted to care as Jimmy Cross cared. And yet when he closed his eyes, all he could think was Boom-down, and all he could feel was the pleasure of having his boots off and the fog curling in around him and the damp soil and the Bible smells and the plush comfort of night.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“If inner peace is the true objective, would I win it in exile?”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“A handsome kid, really. Sharp gray eyes, lean and narrow-waisted, and when he died it was almost beautiful, the way the sunlight came around him and lifted him up and sucked him high into a tree full of moss and vines and white blossoms.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Gravity has a hand. Bear in mind trapdoors. We fall in love, yes? Tumble, in fact. Is it choice? Enough said.”
― Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

“Kathleen had just turned ten, and this trip was a kind of birthday present, showing her the world, offering a small piece of her father’s history.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

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

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

“his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole”
― Tim O'Brien, Things They Carried

“Linda nodded at me. She was standing under a yellow streetlight. A nine-year-old girl, just a kid, and yet there was something ageless in her eyes—not a child, not an adult—just a bright 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. “Dead,” I said. Linda smiled. It was a secret smile, as if she knew things nobody could ever know, and she reached out and touched my wrist and said, “Timmy, stop crying. It doesn’t matter.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried