“ Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story. Tim O'Brien
“ …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?… Tim O'Brien
“ 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… Tim O'Brien
“ There is always the threat of tomorrow's treachery, or next year's treachery, or the treachery implicit in all the tomorrows beyond that. Tim O'Brien
“ 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… Tim O'Brien
“ They would get their shit together, and keep it together, and maintain it neatly and in good working order. Tim O'Brien
“ 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. Tim O'Brien
“ On occasions the war was like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put fancy spin on it, you could make it dance. Tim O'Brien
“ 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… Tim O'Brien
“ 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… Tim O'Brien
