Tim O'Brien Quotes

...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.

But this too is true: stories can save us.

Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons.

But in a story I can steal her soul.

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.

Imagination is a killer.

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

My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead.

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

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.

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

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

Let the story tell itself.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Do we choose sleep? Hell no and bullshit - we fall. We give ourselves over to possibility, to whim and fancy, to the bed, to the pillow, the tiny white tablet. And these choose for us.

They would repair the leaks in their eyes.

You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.

Zapped while zipping.

I learned that moral courage is harder than physical courage.

Fantasy has a dark side to it. It also has a light hemisphere - the power of the human imagination to keep going, to imagine a better tomorrow.

The wars don't end when you sign peace treaties or when the years go by. They will echo on until I'm gone and all the widows and orphans are gone.

Poetry is not an issue of form and enjambments. Poetry, as the word is classically used, has to do with sound and sense. It can be rhyme. It can be rhythm, pace, breath.

I received my draft notice right after graduation from college and had three months before going into the Army in September to think about it.

And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh.

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.

Stories are for joining the past to the future.

Stories can save us.

But I do like churches. The way it feels inside. It feels good when you just sit there, like you're in a forest and everything's really quiet, except there's still this sound you can't hear.

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.

Nostalgia-- that's the basic sickness, and I never heard of a doctor who can cure it.

In fiction workshops, we tend to focus on matters of verisimilitude largely because such issues are so much easier to talk about than the failure of imagination.

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.

Love, as wonderful and horrible as it is, has at its center a kind of pitiful humor.

That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.

Each morning, despite the unknowns, they made their legs move.

I hated him for making me stop hating him

He wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.

Don't throw away luck on little stuff. Save it up.

I know what it is to feel unloved, to want revenge, to make mistakes, to suffer disappointment, yet also to find the courage to go forward in life.

On occasions the war was like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put fancy spin on it, you could make it dance.