Quotes from Tim O'Brien

I grew up with the Gene Kelly look at war. The cheerful kind of stories you tell about a horrendous war.

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

They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.

A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.

But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget.

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

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

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

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.

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

But this too is true: stories can save us.

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

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

Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth.

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

What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end...

And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.

And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

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.

It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that 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.

A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.

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

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.