Tim O'Brien > Quotes

“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

“when you're dead, you just have to be yourself.”
― Tim O'Brien

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human be-havior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.”
― Tim O'Brien

“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

“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

“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

“There it is, they'd say. Over and over—there it is, my friend, there it is
—as if the repetition itself were an act of poise, a balance between crazy
and almost crazy, knowing without going, there it is, which meant be
cool, let it ride, because Oh yeah, man, you can't change what can't be
changed, there it is, there it absolutely and positively and fucking well is.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

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

“Если ты хочешь помочь твоему ветерану, избегай церквей, приписывающих зло потусторонним силам – например, дьяволу, соблазняющему людей или вселяющемуся в них. Дело, в частности, в том, что, представляя себя жертвой внешнего воздействия («дьявол меня на это толкнул»), человек не может выработать зрелой самооценки, предполагающей развитие и обогащение от жизненного опыта.

Пейшенс Мейсон. «Выздоровление от войны»”
― Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

“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

“You learn, finally, that you'll die, and so you try to hang on to your own life, that gentle, naive kid you used to be, but then after a while the sentiment takes over, and the sadness, because you know for a fact that you can't ever bring any of it back again. You just can't.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Когда ты разоблачен, перестаешь бояться разоблачения.”
― Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

“Is there sound, he wondered, without reception? Do you hear the shot that gets you? How big, in fact, was the Big Bang? Do our pathetic earthly squeals fall upon deaf ears? Is silence golden or common stone.”
― Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

“He killed me at the Scrabble board, barely concentrating, and on those occasions when speech was necessary he had a way of compressing large thoughts into small, cryptic packets of language.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“The days seemed to stretch out toward infinity, blank and humid, without purpose, and at night I was kept awake by the endless drone of mosquitoes and helicopters. (Why wars must be contested under such conditions I shall never understand. Is not death sufficient?)”
― Tim O'Brien, Tomcat in Love

“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

“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

“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

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

“Well, God," I said, "you're dead."

Linda smiled. It was a secret smile, as if she knew things nobody could ever know, and she reached out and touched my wrist and said, "Timmy, stop crying. It doesn't matter.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Maybe it's a crackpot theory, but in the aftermath of my sickness, I've often wondered if what we call insanity might be a biological response to mankind's consciousness of its own mortality, a way of unknowing what we know, a defense against the specter of nothingness and foreverness and intolerable finality.”
― Tim O'Brien, Dad's Maybe Book

“how much I detested their blind, thoughtless, automatic acquiescence to it all, their simpleminded patriotism, their prideful ignorance, their love-it-or-leave-it platitudes,”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“I'm young and happy. I'll never die.”
― Tim O'Brien

“Twenty years. A lot like yesterday, a lot like never.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“In the interests of truth, however, I want to make it clear that Norman Bowker was in no way responsible for what happened to Kiowa. Norman did not experience a failure of nerve that night. He did not freeze up or lose the Silver Star for valor. That part of the story is my own.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Fakat şu da doğru; hikayeler bizi kurtarabilir.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“War is brutal. Civilians just suffer through it”
― Tim O'Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home

“It was a brisk, polite town. It did not know shit about shit, and did not care to know. Norman Bowker leaned back and considered what he might’ve said on the subject. He knew shit. It was his specialty. The smell, in particular, but also the numerous varieties of texture and taste. Someday he’d give a lecture on the topic. Put on a suit and tie and stand up in front of the Kiwanis club and tell the fuckers about all the wonderful shit he knew. Pass out samples, maybe.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried