Tim O'Brien Quotes

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

And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever.

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

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

Stories can save us.

Stories are for joining the past to the future.

Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

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

…he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered. He wanted her to be a virgin and not a virgin all at once. He wanted to know her. Intimate secrets: Why poetry? Why so sad?...

Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.

The afternoon had passed to a ghostly gray. She was struck by the immensity of things, so much water and sky and forest, and after a time it occurred to her that she’d lived a life almost entirely ind...

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

I detested their blind, thoughtless, automatic acquiescence to it all, their simpleminded patriotism, their prideful ignorance, their love-it-or-leave-it platitudes, how they were sending me off to a...

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

But this too is true: stories can save us.

They would get their shit together, and keep it together, and maintain it neatly and in good working order.

It was a flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher, spinning off the edge of the earth and beyond the sun and through the vast silent vacuum where there were no burdens a...

Whenever he told the story, Rat had a tendency to stop now and then, interrupting the flow, inserting little clarifications or bits of analysis and personal opinion. It was a bad habit, Mitchell Sande...

My whole life seemed to spill out into the river, swirling away from me, everything I had ever been or ever wanted to be.

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 belie...