Tim O'Brien > Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“There were red checkers and black checkers. The playing field was laid out in a strict grid, no tunnels or mountains or jungles. You knew where you stood. You knew the score. The pieces were out on the board, the enemy was visible, you could watch the tactics unfolding into larger strategies. There was a winner and a loser. There were rules.”
― 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

“Proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life.”
― 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

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

“Psychology—that was one thing I knew. You don't try to scare people in

broad daylight. You wait. Because the darkness squeezes you inside

yourself, you get cut off from the outside world, the imagination

takes over. That's basic psychology. I'd pulled enough night guard to

know how the fear factor gets multiplied as you sit there hour after

hour, nobody to talk to, nothing to do but stare into the big black

hole at the center of your own sorry soul”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Stories can save us.”
― 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

“If you weren't humping, you were waiting. I remember the monotony. Digging foxholes. Slapping mosquitoes. The sun and the heat and the endless paddies. Even in the deep bush, where you could die any number of ways, the war was nakedly and aggressively boring. But it was a strange boredom. It was boredom with a twist, the kind of boredom that caused stomach disorders. You'd be sitting at the top of a high hill, the flat paddies stretching out below, and the day would be calm and hot and utterly vacant, and you'd feel the boredom dripping inside you like a leaky faucet, except it wasn't water, it was a sort of acid, and with each little droplet you'd feel the stuff eating away at important organs. You'd try to relax. You'd uncurl your fists and let your thoughts go. Well, you'd think, this isn't so bad. And right then you'd hear gunfire behind you and your nuts would fly up into your throat and you'd be squealing pig squeals. That kind of boredom.”
― 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

“All right,' I said, 'what's the moral?'
'Forget it.'
'No, go ahead.'
For a long while he was quiet, looking away, and the silence kept stretching out until it was almost embarrassing. Then he shrugged and gave ma a stare that lasted all day.
'Hear that quiet, man?' he said. 'That quiet - just listen. There's your moral.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried