Tim O'Brien Quotes

They didn’t know the first thing about Diem’s tyranny, or the nature of Vietnamese nationalism, or the long colonialism of the French—this was all too damned complicated, it required some reading—but...

They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness. Greased they'd say. Offed, lit up, zapped while zipping. It wasn't cruelty, just stage presence. They were actors. When someone died, it w...

Well right now,' she said, '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.

Делать обобщения относительно войны - все равно, что делать обобщения относительно мира. Почти все правда. Почти все вымысел. Странность войны в том, что вы никогда не будете живы больше, чем когда на...

Если ты хочешь помочь твоему ветерану, избегай церквей, приписывающих зло потусторонним силам – например, дьяволу, соблазняющему людей или вселяющемуся в них. Дело, в частности, в том, что, представля...

Каждый держался, как умел. Иной принимал рассеянно-пренебрежительный вид, иной прикрывался напускной гордостью, другие солдатской выправкой или ненужным рвением. Они боялись смерти, еще больше боялись...

Когда умирает человек, положено винить кого-то или что-то. Джимми Кросс это понимал. Можно винить войну. Можно винить идиотов, которые войну развязали. Можно винить Кайову за то, что на нее пошел. Мож...

But truly it was not the money that mattered. It was the distant glitter of everything that was possible in the world, the things she had always wanted for herself and could not name and called happin...

When you're dead, you just have to be yourself.

A hundred stories [...] Ghosts rising from the dead. Ghosts behind you and in front of you and inside you.

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems...

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done. If a story seems...

Building the Mean Streak was not a mistake. We needed a wooden coaster and we were hoping for a Beast. But it was never on the same planet as the Beast. Nothing has ever come close to the Beast.

But in a story I can steal her soul.

Everywhere, it seemed, in the tress and water and sky, a great worldwide sadness came pressing down on me, a crushing sorrow, sorrow like I had never known it before.

Garden of Evil. Over here, man, every sin’s real fresh and original. (p80 Mitch Sanders in How to Tell a True War Story)

He hated her. Yes, he did. He hated her. Love, too, but it was a hard, hating kind of love.

He thought about the difference between good times and bad times, and how funny it was that he could not state the difference, only feel it.

I am forever astonished at the longevity of childhood. How it never ends. How we are what we were. How turtles and engines and stolen kisses leave their jet trail across our gaping lives.

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.