Tim O'Brien Quotes

Every dark cloud may well have its silver lining, but I have come to learn that every silver lining has its dark consequences.

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.

Fakat şu da doğru; hikayeler bizi kurtarabilir.

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...

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

What they carried varied by mission.

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.

Imagination, like reality, has its limits.

Иной раз ты способен на подвиг, идешь прямо на вражеский огонь, а после, когда вся обстановка вокруг несравнимо легче, огромных усилий стоит не закрывать глаза. А иногда, как на том поле, грань между...

It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.

It's not just the embarrassment of tears. That's part of it, no doubt, but what embarrasses me much more, and always will, is the paralysis that took my heart. A moral freeze: I couldn't decide, I cou...

The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, repaying itself over and over.

The day was cloudy. I passed through towns with familiar last names, through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but...

The greater a man’s fear, the greater his potential courage.

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 u...

Главный груз всегда был внутри, то, что совершено или что предстояло совершить.

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...

They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight...

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.

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...