P. O'Brien Quotes

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.

It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.

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.

Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has.

The presence of danger has a way of making you feel fully awake.

There is always the threat of tomorrow's treachery, or next year's treachery, or the treachery implicit in all the tomorrows beyond that.

you're never more alive than when you're almost dead.

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

... 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.

They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.

...precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated.

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.

Once you're alive, you can't ever be dead.

...his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered.

Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.

A true war story is never moral.

The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.

Did I choose this life of illusion? Don't be mad. My bed was made, I just lied in it.

I live in my head all day long and the world is a little dreamy.

And as a writer now, I want to save Linda's life. Not her body--her life.

Inside I feel much like a 12-year-old or a 17-year-old who knows big words.

A miracle to confound natural law, a baffling reversal of the inevitable consequences . . . a miracle. . . . An act of high imagination -- daring and lurid and impossible. Yes, a cartoon of the mind.

It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite; he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.

I'll picture Rat Kiley face, his grief, and I'll think, You dumb cooze. Because she wasn't listening. It wasn't a war story. It was a love story.

Let the story tell itself.

All that peace, man, if felt so good it hurt. I want to hurt it back.

It's very hard to articulate the things that are important about writing.

He had an opinion of himself, I think, that was too high for his own good. Or maybe it was the reverse. Maybe it was a low opinion that he kept trying to erase.

There was the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.

Imagination is a killer.

I guess we're really brothers, aren't we? Don't know what that means, except it means that some of the same things we remember.

But in a story I can steal her soul.

Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons.

Judged by the dollars spent, gambling is now more popular in America than baseball, the movies, and Disneyland-combined.

Donald Trump became seen as a credible businessperson with a real track record, even though that was at odds with reality.

Donald Trump was seen for quite a long time as a punchline, the jokes about the excesses and the failures of the 1980s. And he had become, you know, a human shingle and a punchline.

The problem with movies is that movies end and your life doesn't. This doesn't appear to cause any trouble, but it does cause confusion, which is almost as bad.

When all else fails, there's always delusion.

Applaud my idiocy.

A study in the Washington Post says that women havebetter verbal skills than men. I just want to say to the authors of that study: 'Duh.

Visionary decision-making happens at the intersection of intuition and logic.

When you find your path in life and are in sync with your primary missions in this lifetime, everything else just falls into place.

Discovering and fulfilling your personal destiny is life’s ultimate challenge and its greatest reward.

Understanding your strengths and weaknesses is an unending process of self-discovery and creative evolution. Real success depends on being true to what fascinates you.

Bad art has the power to deform a people just as good art generates new reflection, growth, vision, and hope.

A man who takes into consideration the feelings of others even when arranging the manner of his own death shows a nobility of character which compels the admiration of all classes.

It ain't a crapshoot unless you write crap.

Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say. ~Sharon O'Brien

The quest for enlightenment illustrates the paradox of desire—the fact that you must have desire to be motivated to transcend being ruled by desire.

Relationships should be like flat pack come with easy to follow instructions so that you knew which bits fitted where