Tim O'Brien > Quotes

“Martha shut her eyes. She crossed her arms at her chest as if suddenly cold and said she was glad he hadn't tried it. She didn't understand how men could do those things. What things? he asked, and Martha said, The things men do. Then he nodded. It began to form. Oh, he said, those things.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“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

“It's sad when you learn you're not much of a hero.”
― Tim O'Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home

“The story' Sanders would say "the whole tone, man, you're wrecking it."
Tone?'
The sound. You need to get a consitent sound, like slow or fast, funny or sad. All these disgressions, they just screw up your story's sound. Stick to what happened.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“They would get their shit together, and keep it together, and maintain it neatly and in good working order.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“A few names were known in full, some in part, some not at all. No one cared. Except in clearly unreasonable cases, a soldier was generally called by the name he preferred, or by what he called himself, and no great effort was made to disentangle Christian names from surnames from nicknames.”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“I have tried, of course, to be faithful to the evidence. Yet evidence is not truth. It is only evident.”
― Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

“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

“Her white skin and those dark brown eyes and the way she always smiled at the world - always, it seemed - as if her face had been designed that way. The smile never went away.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“I drank some chocolate milk and then lay down on the sofa in my “living” room, not really sad, just floating; trying to imagine what it was to be dead. Nothing much came to me. I remember closing my eyes and whispering her name, trying to make her come back. As we stared at each other, neither of us moving, I felt some...thing go shut in my heart while something else swung open”
― Tim O'Brien

“All around me the options seemed to be narrowing, as if I were hurtling down a huge black funnel, the whole world squeezing in tight.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“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 in the movies where the dead guy rolls around and does fancy spins and goes ass over teakettle-not like that. Kiowa said. The bastard just flat fuck fell. Boom down. Nothing else.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Linda was nine then, as I was, but we were in love. And it was real. When I write about her now, three decades later, it's tempting to dismiss it as a crush, an infatuation of childhood, but I know for a fact that what we felt for each other was as deep and rich as love can ever get. It had all the shadings and complexities of mature adult love, and maybe more, because there were not yet words for it, and because it was not yet fixed to comparisons or chronologies or the ways by which adults measure such things.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that’s all it was. And right then I submitted. I would go to the war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“He thought about the difference between good times and bad times, and how funny it was that he could not state the difference, only feel it.”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“He hated her. Yes, he did. He hated her. Love, too, but it was a hard, hating kind of love.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“A place where your life exists before you live it, and where it goes afterwards.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“In some respects, though not many, the waiting was worse than the tunnel itself. Imagination was a killer.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

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

“Hear that quiet, man?' he said. 'That quiet - just listen. There's your moral.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Not a minister," he said, "but I do like churches. The way it feels inside. It feels good when you just sit there, like you're in a forest and everything's really quiet, except there's still this sound you can't hear.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“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

“Stories can save us.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“I hated him for making me stop hating him”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“He showed me how...See, he says he's going up through Laos, then into Burma, and then some other country, I forget, and then India and Iran and Turkey, and then Greece, and the rest is easy. That's what he said. The rest is easy, he said.”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“Courage is nothing to laugh at, not if it is proper courage and exercised by men who know what they do is proper. Proper courage is wise courage. It's acting wisely, acting wisely when fear would have a man act otherwise. It is the endurance of the soul in spite of fear - wisely.”
― Tim O'Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home

“In the next days it took little provocation for us to flick the flint of our Zippo lighters. Thatched roofs take the flame quickly, and on bad days the hamlets of Pinkville burned, taking our revenge in fire. It was good to walk from Pinkville and to see fire behind Alpha Company. It was good, just as pure hate is good.”
― Tim O'Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home

“What is love, for God's sake, if not the most distilled obsession?”
― Tim O'Brien, Tomcat in Love

“The day was cloudy. I passed through towns with familiar last names, through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried