Tim O'Brien > Quotes

“Writing doesn’t get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write.”
― Tim O'Brien

“First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rusack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Do we choose sleep? Hell no and bullshit - we fall. We give ourselves over to possibility, to whim and fancy, to the bed, to the pillow, the tiny white tablet. And these choose for us.”
― Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

“And now it is time for a final act of courage. I urge you: March proudly into your own dream.”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth; if you don’t care for the truth, watch how you vote.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“There should be a law, I though. If you support a war, if you think it's worth the price, that's fine, but you he to put your own precious fluids on the line. You have to head for the front and hook up with an infantry unit and help spill the blood. And you have to bring along your wife, or your kids, or your lover. A law, I thought.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“My heart tells me to stop right here, to offer quiet benediction and call it the end. But the truth won't allow it. Because there is no end, happy or otherwise. Nothing is fixed, nothing solved. the facts, such as they are, finally spin off into the void of things missing, the inconclusiveness of us. Who are we? Where do we go? The ambiguity may be dissatisfying, even irritating, but this is a love story. There is no tidiness. Blame it on the human heart. One way or another, it seems, we all perform vanishing tricks, effacing history, locking up our lives and slipping day by day into the graying shadows. Our whereabouts are uncertain. All secrets lead to the dark, and beyond teh dark there is only maybe.”
― Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

“In many ways he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intentions, a roll of fat jiggling at his belly, slow of foot but always plodding along, always there when you needed him, a believer in the virtues of simplicity and directness and hard labor.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“One morning in Saigon she'd asked what it was all about 'This whole war,' she said, 'why was everybody so mad at everybody else?'

I shook my head. 'They weren't mad exactly. Some people wanted one thing, other people wanted another thing.'

'What did you want?'

'Nothing,' I said. 'To stay alive.'

'That's all?'

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

“You can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“She'd say amazing things sometimes. "Once you're alive," she'd say, "you cant ever be dead.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Let the story tell itself.”
― Tim O'Brien

“There is always the threat of tomorrow's treachery, or next year's treachery, or the treachery implicit in all the tomorrows beyond that.”
― Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

“A miracle to confound natural law, a baffling reversal of the inevitable consequences . . . a miracle. . . . An act of high imagination -- daring and lurid and impossible. Yes, a cartoon of the mind.”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“What happened, and what might have happened?”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“They sat smoking the dead mans dope until the chopper came”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“With a hangover and with fear, it is difficult to put a helmet on your head.”
― Tim O'Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home

“It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty... Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference- a powerful, implacable beauty- and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“The presence of danger has a way of making you feel fully awake.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Mitchell sanders was sitting under a banyan tree and using a thumbnail to pry off all the body lice, working slowly, carefully depositing them in a USO envelope. When he was done he sealed the envelope, wrote 'Free' in the right hand corner, and sent it to his draft board in ohio.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“I would wish this book could take the form of a plea for everlasting peace, a plea from one who knows... Or it would be fine to confirm the odd beliefs about war: it's horrible, but it's a crucible of men and events and, in the end, it makes more of a man out of you.

But, still, none of these notions seems right. Men are killed, dead human beings are heavy and awkward to carry, things smell different in Vietnam, soldiers are afraid and often brave, drill sergeants are boors, some men think the war is proper and just and others don't and most don't care. Is that the stuff for a morality lesson, even for a theme?

Do dreams offer lessons? Do nightmares have themes, do we awaken and analyze them and live our lives and advise others as a result? Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.”
― Tim O'Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home

“And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh.”
― Tim O'Brien

“Yes, the issue was courage. It always had been, even as a kid. Things scared him. He couldn't help it. Noise scared him, dark scared him. Tunnels scared him: the time he almost won the Silver Star for valor. But the real issue was courage. It had nothing to do with the Silver Star...Oh, he would've liked winning it, true, but that wasn't the issue. He would've liked showing the medal to his father, the heavy feel of it, looking his father in the eye to show he had been brave, but even that wasn't the real issue. The real issue was the power of will to defeat fear. A matter of figuring a way to do it. Somehow working his way into that secret chamber of the human heart, where, in tangles, lay the circuitry for all that was possible, the full range of what a man might be. He believed, like Doc Peret, that somewhere inside each man is a biological center for the exercise of courage, a piece of tissue that might be touched and sparked and made to respond, a chemical maybe, or a lone chromosome that when made to fire would produce a blaze of valor that even the biles could not extinguish. A filament, a fuse, that if ignited would release the full energy of what might be. There was a Silver Star twinkling somewhere inside him.”
― Tim O'Brien

“I learned that words make a difference. It's easier to cope with a kicked bucked than a corpse; if it isn't human, it doesn't matter much if it's dead.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“The greater a man's fear, the greater his potential courage”
― Tim O'Brien

“Each of us, I suppose needs his illusions. Life after death. A maker of planets. A woman to love, a man to hate. Something sacred. But what a waste.”
― Tim O'Brien, Tomcat in Love

“He wanted to know her. Intimate secrets: Why poetry? Why so sad? Why that grayness in her eyes? Why so alone? Not lonely, just alone—riding her bike across campus or sitting off by herself in the cafeteria—even dancing, she danced alone—and it was the aloneness that filled him with love”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“He believed in mission. But . . . he did not believe in it as an intellectual imperative, or even as a professional standard. Mission . . . was an abstract notion that took meaning in concrete situations.”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“CEASE FIRE,' Captain Johansen shouted. 'Cease fire, what's wrong with you guys? Stop wasting the goddamn ammo. CEASE FIRE!'
Cease fire,' the lieutenants hollered.
Cease fire,' the platoon sergeants hollered.
Cease the goddamn fire,' shouted the squad leaders.
That,' I told Barney, 'is the chain of command.”
― Tim O'Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home