Quotes from Tim O'Brien

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.

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.

Story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

It occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.

She'd say amazing things sometimes. Once you're alive, she'd say, you cant ever be dead.

There should be a law, I though. If you support a war, if you think it's worth the price, that's fine, but you he to put your own precious fluids on the line. You have to head for the front and hook up with an infantry unit and help spill the blood. And you have to bring along your wife, or your kids, or your lover. A law, I thought.

And now it is time for a final act of courage. I urge you: March proudly into your own dream.

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.

If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote.

What happened, and what might have happened?

In many ways he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intentions, a roll of fat jiggling at his belly, slow of foot but always plodding along, always there when you needed him, a believer in the virtues of simplicity and directness and hard labor.

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

It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty... Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference- a powerful, implacable beauty- and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly

Let the story tell itself.

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. 'Daddy, tell the truth,'Kathleen can say, 'did you ever kill anybody?' And I can say, honest, 'Of course not.' Or I can say, honestly, 'Yes.

One morning in Saigon she'd asked what it was all about 'This whole war,' she said, 'why was everybody so mad at everybody else?' I shook my head. 'They weren't mad exactly. Some people wanted one thing, other people wanted another thing.' 'What did you want?' 'Nothing,' I said. 'To stay alive.' 'That's all?' 'Yes.

I learned that words make a difference. It's easier to cope with a kicked bucked than a corpse; if it isn't human, it doesn't matter much if it's dead.

Peace never bragged. If you didn't look for it, it wasn't there.

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.

They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak.

If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth.

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

They sat smoking the dead mans dope until the chopper came

Mitchell sanders was sitting under a banyan tree and using a thumbnail to pry off all the body lice, working slowly, carefully depositing them in a USO envelope. When he was done he sealed the envelope, wrote 'Free' in the right hand corner, and sent it to his draft board in ohio.