Tim O'Brien > Quotes

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

“Secretive and suspicious, loners by nature, the six Greenies would sometimes vanish for days at a time,”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“In the mornings we sometimes went out on long hikes into the woods, and at night we played Scrabble or listened to records or sat reading in front of his big stone fireplace.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“carrying an umbrella and a copy of Plato’s Republic”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“I keep trying to find a way to tell this story, to explain how things went bad”
― Tim O'Brien, Tim O'Brien: The Things They Carried (Paperback); 2009 Edition

“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 memories are erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“an umbrella and a copy of Plato’s”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Inside the body, or beyond the body, there is something absolute and unchanging. The human life is all one thing, like a blade tracing loops on ice: a little kid, a twenty-three-year-old infantry sergeant, a middle-aged writer knowing guilt and sorrow.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“the waiting was worse than the tunnel itself. Imagination was a killer.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried