Tim O'Brien > Quotes

“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

“Fakat şu da doğru; hikayeler bizi kurtarabilir.”
― 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

“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

“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

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

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

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

“His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole, his eyebrows were thin and arched like a woman's, his nose was undamaged, there was a slight tear at the lobe of one ear, his clean black hair was swept upward into a cowlick at the rear of the skull, his forehead was lightly freckled, his fingernails were clean, the skin at his left cheek was peeled back in three ragged strips, his right cheek was smooth and hairless, there was a butterfly on his chin, his neck was open to the spinal cord and the blood there was thick and shiny and it was this wound that had killed him. He lay face-up in the center of the trail, a slim, dead, almost dainty young man.”
― 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

“Like when Ted Lavender went too heavy on the tranquilizers. 'How's the war today?' somebody would say, and Ted Lavender would give a soft, spacey smile and say, 'Mellow, man. We got ourselves a nice mellow war today.”
― 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

“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

“Building the Mean Streak was not a mistake. We needed a wooden coaster and we were hoping for a Beast. But it was never on the same planet as the Beast. Nothing has ever come close to the Beast.”
― Tim O'Brien, Dick Kinzel: Roller Coaster King of Cedar Point Amusement Point

“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

“It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“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

“The rock- it's talking. And the fog, too, and the grass and the goddamn mongooses. Everything talks. The trees talk politics, the monkeys talk religion. The whole country. Vietnam. The place talks. It talks. Understand? Nam- it truly talks.”
― 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

“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

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

“How do you generalize? War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead. The truths are contradictory.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“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

“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

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

“If time and space were in fact entwined along the loop of relativity, how then could anyone ever reach a point of no return? Were not all such points contrivance? Therefore meaningless? So, again, what was the point?
Not to return.”
― Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

“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

“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

“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