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

“We kept the dead alive with stories.”
― Tim O'Brien

“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

“They died so as not to die of embarrassment.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Reinvigorated by repeated utterance, fertilized by outrage, mythomania claimed its earliest victims among chat room patrons—the disappointed, the defeated, the disrespected, and the genetically suspicious.”
― Tim O'Brien, America Fantastica

“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

“You got these blinders on about women. How gentle and peaceful they are. All that crap about how if we had a pussy for president there wouldn't be no more wars. Pure garbage. You got to get rid of that sexist attitude.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“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. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture. They carried their reputations. 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

“At the hour of dusk you sit in your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colours in the river and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.”
― 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

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