Quotes from Tim O'Brien

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

It was boredom with a twist, the kind of boredom that caused stomach disorders." (p 34 "Spin")

They were afraid of dying but they were even more afraid to show it...they died so as not to die of embarrassment...they were too frightened to be cowards." (p 20-21 "TTTC")

On the morning after Ted Lavender died, First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross crouched at the bottom of his foxhole and burned Martha's letters. Then he burned the two photographs.

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.

It had no memory, therefore no guilt

Gravity has a hand. Bear in mind trapdoors. We fall in love, yes? Tumble, in fact. Is it choice? Enough said.

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

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.

this too is true: stories can save us.

He was just a kid at war, in love. He was twenty-four years old. He couldn't help it.

If a story seems moral, do not believe it.

They were afraid of dying but they were even more afraid to show it. They found jokes to tell. They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness.

The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. That's the real obsession. All those stories. Not bloody stories, necessarily. Happy stories, too, and even a few peace stories.

The fog made things seem hollow and unattached. He tried not to think about Ted Lavender, but then he was thinking how fast it was, no dram, down and dead, and how it was hard to feel anything except surprise. It seemed unchristian. He wished he could find some great sadness, or even anger, but the emotion wasn't there and he couldn't make it happen. Mostly he felt pleased to be alive.

Finally one of his buddies asks what happened with the nurse, why so hot for combat, and the guy says, 'All that peace, man, it felt so good it hurt. I want to hurt it back.

Or Kiowa teaching a rain dance to Rat Kiley and Dave Jensen, the three of them whooping and leaping around barefoot while a bunch of villagers looked on with a mixture of fascination and giggly horror. Afterward, Rat said, 'So where's the rain?' and Kiowa said, 'The earth is slow, but the buffalo is patient,' and Rat thought about it and said, 'Yeah, but where's the rain?

He enjoyed not being dead. Lying there, Kiowa admired Lieutenant Jimmy Cross's capacity for grief. He wanted to share the man's pain, he wanted to care as Jimmy Cross cared. And yet when he closed his eyes, all he could think was Boom-down, and all he could feel was the pleasure of having his boots off and the fog curling in around him and the damp soil and the Bible smells and the plush comfort of night.

Large effects might come from small causes.

Sun and waves and gentle winds, all love and lightness.

Dobbins shrugged his shoulders. What's serious? I was a kid. This thing is, I believed in God and all that, but it wasn't the religious part that interested me. Just being nice to people, that's all. Being decent.

A moral freeze: I couldn't decide, I couldn't act, I couldn't comport myself with even a pretense of modest human dignity.

Henry Dobbins made the washing motion with his hands. You're right, he said. All you can do is be nice. Treat them decent, you know?

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