Tim O'Brien > Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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 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

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

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

“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

“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

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

“In the field, though, the causes were immediate. A moment of carelessness or bad judgment or plain stupidity carried consequences that lasted forever.”
― 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