With a hangover and with fear, it is difficult to put a helmet on your head. — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
“They were afraid of dying, but they were even more afraid to show it.” — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
Writing doesn’t get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write. — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
A place where your life exists before you live it, and where it goes afterwards. — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth. — Tim O'Brien Fiction Copy Share Image
“Her white skin and those dark brown eyes and the way she always smiled at the world - always, it seemed -… — Tim O'Brien Brown eyes Copy Share Image
Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones - THAT… — Tim O'Brien Body Copy Share Image
I'll picture Rat Kiley face, his grief, and I'll think, You dumb cooze. Because she wasn't listening. It wasn't a war story.… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
There was the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry. — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories. — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth. — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
You don't know. When I'm out there at night I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving,… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
“Well, right now I'm not dead. But when I am, it's like...I don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book… — Tim O'Brien Book Copy Share Image
“It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty... Like a killer forest fire,… — Tim O'Brien Aesthetic Copy Share Image
...you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
“You learn, finally, that you'll die, and so you try to hang on to your own life, that gentle, naive kid you… — Tim O'Brien Death Copy Share Image
I cannot remember much, I cannot feel much. Maybe erasure is necessary. Maybe the human spirit defends itself as the body does,… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
It's not just the embarrassment of tears. That's part of it, no doubt, but what embarrasses me much more, and always will,… — Tim O'Brien Dignity Copy Share Image
A giddy feeling, in a way, except there was the dreamy edge of impossibility to it - like running a dead-end maze… — Tim O'Brien Conclusion Copy Share Image
“Linda was nine then, as I was, but we were in love. And it was real. When I write about her now,… — Tim O'Brien Children Copy Share Image
“I drank some chocolate milk and then lay down on the sofa in my “living” room, not really sad, just floating; trying… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
“I remember Mitchell Sanders sitting quietly in the shade of an old banyan tree. He was using a thumbnail to pry off… — Tim O'Brien History Copy Share Image
“Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will… — Tim O'Brien Books Copy Share Image
“My heart tells me to stop right here, to offer quiet benediction and call it the end. But the truth won't allow… — Tim O'Brien Day by day Copy Share Image
“It was a brisk, polite town. It did not know shit about shit, and did not care to know. Norman Bowker leaned… — Tim O'Brien Smell Copy Share Image
Linda was nine then, as I was, but we were in love...it had all the shadings and complexities of mature adult love… — Tim O'Brien Adults Copy Share Image
![“Well, right now 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. [...] An old one. It's up on a library shelf, so you're safe and everything, but the book hasn't been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just…” quote by Tim O'Brien](https://sms4smile.com/q/img-quotes/abb/tim-o-brien-1818_book_well-right-now-i-m-not-dead-but-when-i-a_911144.png)
