Tim O'Brien > Quotes

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Главный груз всегда был внутри, то, что совершено или что предстояло совершить.”
― 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

“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

“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

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

“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

“Getting shot should be an experience from which you can draw some small pride. I don't mean the macho stuff. All I mean is that you should be able to talk about it: the stiff thump of the bullet, like a fist, the way it knocks the air out of you and makes you cough, how the sound of the gunshot arrives about ten years later, and the dizzy feeling, the smell of yourself, the things you think about and say and do right afterward, the way your eyes focus on a tiny white pebble or a blade of grass and how you start thinking, Oh man, that's the last thing I'll ever see, that pebble, that blade of grass, which makes you want to cry.

Pride isn't the right word. I don't know the right word. All I know is, you shouldn't feel embarrassed. Humiliation shouldn't be part of it.”
― 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

“Looking back after twenty years, I sometimes wonder if the events of that summer didn’t happen in some other dimension, a place where your life exists before you’ve lived it, and where it goes afterward.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“But truly it was not the money that mattered. It was the distant glitter of everything that was possible in the world, the things she had always wanted for herself and could not name and called happiness because there was no other word.”
― Tim O'Brien

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

“Nostalgia-- that's the basic sickness, and I never heard of a doctor who can cure it.”
― Tim O'Brien

“After that long night in the rain, I’d seemed to grow cold inside, all the illusions gone, all the old ambitions and hopes for myself sucked away into the mud. Over the years, that coldness had never entirely disappeared. There were times in my life when I couldn’t feel much, not sadness or pity or passion, and somehow I blamed this place for what I had become, and I blamed it for taking away the person I had once been. For twenty years this field had embodied all the waste that was Vietnam, all the vulgarity and horror. Now, it was just what it was. Flat and dreary and unremarkable.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

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

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

“Когда умирает человек, положено винить кого-то или что-то. Джимми Кросс это понимал. Можно винить войну. Можно винить идиотов, которые войну развязали. Можно винить Кайову за то, что на нее пошел. Можно винить дождь. Можно винить реку. Можно винить поле, грязь, климат. Можно винить врага. Можно винить артиллерийские снаряды. Можно винить людей, которые поленились прочесть газету, которым наскучили ежедневные сообщения о числе погибших, которые переключают каналы при одном только упоминании политики. Можно винить целые народы. Можно винить Бога. Можно винить производителей оружия или Карла Маркса, злую судьбу или старика в Омахе, забывшего проголосовать.

Но посреди поля причины всегда непосредственные. Минутная небрежность, или ошибочное суждение, или обычная глупость имеют последствия, которые длятся вечно.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“But this, too, was a performance.”
― Tim O'Brien, Tomcat in Love: A Novel

“In a way I wanted to stop myself. It was cruel, I knew that, but right and wrong were somewhere else.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Some things they carried in common. Taking turns they carried the big PRC-77 scrambler radio, which weighed 30 pounds with its battery. They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct. They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds. They carried the land itself - Vietnam, the place, the soil - a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity. They moved like mules.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried