Tim O'Brien Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• Writing doesn’t get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write.

  Tim O'Brien

  Writing, Easier, Harder

  4 Copy quote

• Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is.

  Tim O'Brien

  Essentials, Storytelling, Situation

  8 Copy quote

• But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.

  Tim O'Brien

  Dream, Stories, World

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.213, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  8 Copy quote

• Everyone acts stupid at some time in order to be loved.

  Tim O'Brien

  Stupid, Order

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• Everything was such a damned nice idea when it was an idea.

  Tim O'Brien

  Nice, Ideas, Hindsight

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• It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid. When you’re afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world. You make close friends. You become part of a tribe and you share the same blood- you give it together, you take it together.

  Tim O'Brien

  Blood, Giving, Together

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.183, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  8 Copy quote

• ...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

  Color, Rivers, Finding Yourself

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.78, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

• He wished he could've explained some of this. How he had been braver than he ever thought possible, but how he had not been so brave as he wanted to be. The distinction was important.

  Tim O'Brien

  Brave, Important, Distinction

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.147, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  5 Copy quote

• The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.

  Tim O'Brien

  Memories, Heart, World

  Tim O'Brien (2011). “Tomcat in Love”, p.4, Broadway Books

  7 Copy quote

• Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel-the spiritual texture-of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity.

  Tim O'Brien

  Spiritual, Hate, War

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.78, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  10 Copy quote

• [Y]ou can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

  Tim O'Brien

  War, Evil, Stories

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.66, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  11 Copy quote

• In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true.

  Tim O'Brien

  War, Stories, Safe

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.78, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

• Laughter does not deny pain. Laughter - like a wail - acknowledges and replies to pain.

  Tim O'Brien

  Pain, Laughter, Doe

  9 Copy quote

• Once someone's dead you can't make them undead.

  Tim O'Brien

  Undead

  5 Copy quote

• I survived, but it's not a happy ending.

  Tim O'Brien

  Life, Happy Endings, Rainy

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.58, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  6 Copy quote

• Together we understood what terror was: you're not human anymore. You're a shadow. You slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted to believed in. You know you're about to die. And it's not a movie and you aren't a hero and all you can do is whimper and wait.

  Tim O'Brien

  Hero, Waiting, Leaving

  Tim O'Brien (1990). “The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction”, Broadway

  6 Copy quote

• A place where your life exists before you live it, and where it goes afterwards.

  Tim O'Brien

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• I'm not dead. But when I am, it's likeI don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading.

  Tim O'Brien

  Book, Reading, Knows

  Tim O'Brien (1990). “The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction”, Broadway

  7 Copy quote

• Each of us, I suppose needs his illusions. Life after death. A maker of planets. A woman to love, a man to hate. Something sacred. But what a waste.

  Tim O'Brien

  Hate, Men, Needs

  Tim O'Brien (2011). “Tomcat in Love”, p.319, Broadway Books

  4 Copy quote

• First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rusack. In the late afternoon, after a day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending.

  Tim O'Brien

  Girl, College, Light

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.1, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  11 Copy quote

• The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.

  Tim O'Brien

  Struggle, Heart, Character

  4 Copy quote

• With a hangover and with fear, it is difficult to put a helmet on your head.

  Tim O'Brien

  Fear, Hangover, Difficult

  Tim O'Brien (2011). “If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home”, p.108, Broadway Books

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• ... when he kissed her, she received the kiss without returning it, her eyes wide open, not afraid, not a virgin's eyes, just flat and uninvolved.

  Tim O'Brien

  Eye, Kissing, Numbness

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.11, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

• Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it's not science, it's an exploration, but you never find much in the way of answers.

  Tim O'Brien

  Art, Way, Fiction

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• Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones - THAT kind of love.

  Tim O'Brien

  Years, Body, Nine

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.216, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

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