Tim O'Brien Quotes

I received my draft notice right after graduation from college and had three months before going into the Army in September to think about it.

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...

I suppose if we gain anything from this unsought experience it will be an appreciation for honesty- frankness on the part of our politicians, our friends, our loves, ourselves. No more liars in public...

I survived, but it's not a happy ending.

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.'Daddy,...

Beyond

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

I could feel my moral compass as a soldier, in danger of - I could feel the squeeze, the pressure of frustration and anger and fear combining on me... I felt the danger; I felt the squeeze of it.

When your afraid,reallyafraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world.

In the next days it took little provocation for us to flick the flint of our Zippo lighters. Thatched roofs take the flame quickly, and on bad days the hamlets of Pinkville burned, taking our revenge...

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

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

All of us, I suppose, like to believe that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth, bravely and forthrightly, without thought of personal loss or discredit. Certainly that was...

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

Her white skin and those dark brown eyes and the way she always smiled at the world - always, it seemed - as if her face had been designed that way. The smile never went away.

They were signed Love, Martha, but Lieutenant Cross understood that Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what he sometimes pretended it meant. At

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...

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

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...

I didn't get into writing to make money or get famous or any of that. I got into it to hit hearts, and man, when I get letters not just from the soldiers but from their kids, especially their kids, it...