Tim O'Brien Quotes

I have tried, of course, to be faithful to the evidence. Yet evidence is not truth. It is only evident.

Is there sound, he wondered, without reception? Do you hear the shot that gets you? How big, in fact, was the Big Bang? Do our pathetic earthly squeals fall upon deaf ears? Is silence golden or common...

Proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life.

Sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you...

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 separ...

For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracti...

To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true.

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 thin...

It's sad when you learn you're not much of a hero.

There was the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.

They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried. In

I saw no unity of purpose, no consensus on matters of philosophy or history or law. The very facts were shrouded in uncertainty: Was it a civil war? A war of national liberation or simple aggression?...

In a way I wanted to stop myself. It was cruel, I knew that, but right and wrong were somewhere else.

In a true war story, if there’s a moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth. You can’t tease it out. You can’t extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end,...

[Y]ou can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

Money was never a problem, passports were never required. There were always new places to dance.

Они несли собственные жизни. На них чудовищно давили погода и стресс. На послеполуденной жаре они снимали каски и бронежилеты, шли налегке, что было опасно, но помогало сбросить напряжение. Часто на м...

Together we understood what terror was: you're not human anymore. You're a shadow. You slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, leaving behind everything...

Psychology—that was one thing I knew. You don't try to scare people in broad daylight. You wait. Because the darkness squeezes you inside yourself, you get cut off from the outside world, the imaginat...

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.