Tim O'Brien > Quotes

“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

“My whole life seemed to spill out into the river, swirling away from me, everything I had ever been or ever wanted to be.”
― 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

“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

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

“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

“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

“The afternoon had passed to a ghostly gray. She was struck by the immensity of things, so much water and sky and forest, and after a time it occurred to her that she’d lived a life almost entirely indoors. Her memories were indoor memories, fixed by ceilings and plastered white walls. Her whole life had been locked to geometries: suburban rectangles, city squares. First the house she’d grown up in, then dorms and apartments. The open air had been nothing but a medium of transit, a place for rooms to exist.”
― Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

“I remember Mitchell Sanders sitting quietly in the shade of an old banyan tree. He was using a thumbnail to pry off the body lice, working slowly, carefully depositing the lice in a blue USO envelope. His eyes were tired. It had been a long two weeks in the bush. After an hour or so he sealed up the envelope, wrote FREE in the upper right-hand corner, and addressed it to his draft board in Ohio.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“I am forever astonished at the longevity of childhood. How it never ends. How we are what we were. How turtles and engines and stolen kisses leave their jet trail across our gaping lives.”
― Tim O'Brien, Tomcat in Love

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“Can a word stop your heart as surely as arsenic?”
― Tim O'Brien, Tomcat in Love

“Whenever he told the story, Rat had a tendency to stop now and then, interrupting the flow, inserting little clarifications or bits of analysis and personal opinion. It was a bad habit, Mitchell Sanders said, because all that matters is the raw material, the stuff itself, and you can’t clutter it up with your own half-baked commentary. That just breaks the spell. It destroys the magic. What you have to do, Sanders said, is trust your own story. Get the hell out of the way and let it tell itself.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Sun and waves and gentle winds, all love and lightness.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“On occasions the war was like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put fancy spin on it, you could make it dance.”
― Tim O'Brien

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

“They wanted happiness without knowing what it was, or where to look, which made them want it all the more.”
― Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

“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

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

“I saw no unity of purpose, no consensus on matters of philosophy or history or law. The very facts were shrouded in uncertainty: Was it a civil war? A war of national liberation or simple aggression? Who started it, and when, and why? What really happened to the USS Maddox on that dark night in the Gulf of Tonkin? Was Ho Chi Minh a Communist stooge, or a nationalist savior, or both, or neither? What about the Geneva Accords? What about SEATO and the Cold War? What about dominoes? America was divided on these and a thousand other issues, and the debate had spilled out across the floor of the United States Senate and into the streets, and smart men in pinstripes could not agree on even the most fundamental matters of public policy. The only certainty that summer was moral confusion.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Peace of mind is not a simple matter of pursuing one’s own pleasure; rather, it is inextricably linked to the attitudes of other human beings, to what they want, to what they expect.”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“Red and green and silver flares, all colors, and the rain came down in Technicolor.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“You have taken many risks. You have been brave beyond your wildest expectations. And now it is time for a final act of courage. I urge you: March proudly into your own dream.”
― Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato

“Why do we care about Lizzie Borden, or Judge Crater, or Lee Harvey Oswald, or the Little Big Horn?

Mystery!

Because of all that cannot be known. And what if we did know? What if it were proved—absolutely and purely—that Lizzie Borden took an ax? That Oswald acted alone? That Judge Crater fell into Sicilian hands? Nothing more would beckon, nothing would tantalize.

The thing about Custer is this: no survivors. Hence, eternal doubt, which both frustrates and fascinates. It’s a standoff.

The human desire for certainty collides with our love of enigma. And so I lose sleep over mute facts and frayed ends and missing witnesses.

God knows I’ve tried.

Reams of data, miles of magnetic tape, but none of it satisfies even my own primitive appetite for answers. So I toss and turn. I eat pints of ice cream at two in the morning.

Would it help to announce the problem early on? To plead for understanding? To argue that solutions only demean the grandeur of human ignorance? To point out that absolute knowledge is absolute closure? To issue a reminder that death itself dissolves into uncertainty, and that out of such uncertainty arise great temples and tales of salvation?

I prowl and smoke cigarettes.

I review my notes.

The truth is at once simple and baffling: John Wade was a pro. He did his magic, then walked away. Everything else is conjecture. No answers, yet mystery itself carries me on.”
― Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

“A hundred stories [...] Ghosts rising from the dead. Ghosts behind you and in front of you and inside you.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“Продумывая детали, Уэйд неожиданно проникся новым, угрюмым сочувствием к отцу. Вот, значит, как оно было. Ходишь, делаешь свои дела. Несешь эту ношу, замуровываешь себя в молчание, прячешь адскую правду от всех остальных и большую часть времени от себя тоже. Никакой театральности. Гребешь снег, околачиваешься в политике или торгуешь в ювелирном магазине; периодически ищешь забвения», предаешь настоящее каждым вдохом из пузыря с прогнившим прошлым. А потом в один прекрасный день обнаруживаешь бельевую веревку. Изумляешься. Подтаскиваешь мусорный бак, влезаешь и подцепляешь себя к вечности, словно включаешься в электрическую сеть. Ни записок, ни схем – никаких объяснений. В чем искусство и состоит – искусство отца, искусство Кэти: величественный переход в область чистой, всеобъемлющей Тайны. Не надо путать, подумал он, абсолютное зло с несчастливым детством. Узнать – значит разочароваться. Понять – значит быть преданным. Все жалкие «как» и «почему», все низменные мотивы, все абсцессы души, все отвратительные мелкие уродства личности и истории – не более чем реквизит, который ты прячешь до самого конца Пусть публика завывает во тьме, потрясает кулаками, пусть одни кричат – Как? , другие – Почему?”
― Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods