Tim O'Brien > Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“For just as happiness is more than the absence of sadness, so peace is infinitely more than the absence of war.”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“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

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

“Stories can save us.”
― 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

“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

“Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”
― 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

“Главный груз всегда был внутри, то, что совершено или что предстояло совершить.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Mrs. Kooshof's intolerance for complexity, for the looping circuitry of a well-told tale, symptomizes an epidemic disease of our modern world. (I see it daily among my students. The short attention span, the appetite limited to linearity. Too much Melrose Place.)”
― Tim O'Brien, Tomcat in Love

“Down inside, of course, I wasn't sure, and yet I had to see her one more time. What I needed, I suppose, was some sort of final confirmation, something to carry with me when she was gone.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“He'd been coiled like a snake for years and the tension had gone slack and when he was ready to spring the spring wasn't there, but it could be recoiled.”
― Tim O'Brien, Northern Lights