“They would get their shit together, and keep it together, and maintain it neatly and in good working order.” — Tim O'Brien Funny Copy Share Image
“If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth; if you don’t care for the truth, watch how you… — Tim O'Brien Obscenity Copy Share Image
...his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
“You can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.” — Tim O'Brien Peace Copy Share Image
“A hundred stories [...] Ghosts rising from the dead. Ghosts behind you and in front of you and inside you.” — Tim O'Brien Ghost Copy Share Image
“Everywhere, it seemed, in the tress and water and sky, a great worldwide sadness came pressing down on me, a crushing sorrow,… — Tim O'Brien Grief Copy Share Image
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… — Tim O'Brien Brother Copy Share Image
Each of us, I suppose needs his illusions. Life after death. A maker of planets. A woman to love, a man to… — Tim O'Brien After death Copy Share Image
A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our… — Tim O'Brien Blunders Copy Share Image
A miracle to confound natural law, a baffling reversal of the inevitable consequences . . . a miracle. . . . An… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
“Down inside, of course, I wasn't sure, and yet I had to see her one more time. What I needed, I suppose,… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
“I suppose if we gain anything from this unsought experience it will be an appreciation for honesty- frankness on the part of… — Tim O'Brien Gratitude Copy Share Image
“Mitchell sanders was sitting under a banyan tree and using a thumbnail to pry off all the body lice, working slowly, carefully… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask,… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
“To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war… — Tim O'Brien Death Copy Share Image
In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
“Sometimes the bravest thing in the world was to sit through the night and feel the cold in your bones.” — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
“It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that’s all it was. And right then I submitted. I would go to the… — Tim O'Brien Embarrassed Copy Share Image
Fiction, maybe art in general, is a tentative, uncertain enterprise; it's not science, it's an exploration, but you never find much in… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
In the attic, a warhead no doubt burns. Everything is combustible. Faith burns. Trust burns. Everything burns to nothing and even nothing… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
("I love you," someone says, and instantly we begin to wonder - "Well, how much?" - and when the answer comes -… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
“Though it's odd, you're never more alive than when you're almost dead. You recognize what's valuable. Freshly, as if for the first… — Tim O'Brien Alive Copy Share Image
“In the next days it took little provocation for us to flick the flint of our Zippo lighters. Thatched roofs take the… — Tim O'Brien Bad day Copy Share Image
Together we understood what terror was: you're not human anymore. You're a shadow. You slip out of your own skin, like molting,… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their… — Tim O'Brien Baggage Copy Share Image
“In many ways he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intentions, a roll of fat jiggling at his… — Tim O'Brien America Copy Share Image
“But truly it was not the money that mattered. It was the distant glitter of everything that was possible in the world,… — Tim O'Brien Drama Copy Share Image
“There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war… — Tim O'Brien Peace Copy Share Image
Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember… — Tim O'Brien Eternity Copy Share Image
“Do we choose sleep? Hell no and bullshit - we fall. We give ourselves over to possibility, to whim and fancy, to… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
“War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and… — Tim O'Brien Adventure Copy Share Image
“Courage was not always a matter of yes or no. Sometimes it came in degrees, like the cold; sometimes you were very… — Tim O'Brien Brave Copy Share Image
“What stories can do, I guess, is make things present. I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach… — Tim O'Brien Fiction Copy Share Image
“Is there sound, he wondered, without reception? Do you hear the shot that gets you? How big, in fact, was the Big… — Tim O'Brien Big bang Copy Share Image
“He killed me at the Scrabble board, barely concentrating, and on those occasions when speech was necessary he had a way of… — Tim O'Brien Communication Copy Share Image
What would you do? Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
“It was a flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher, spinning off the edge of the… — Tim O'Brien Author Copy Share Image
The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear… — Tim O'Brien Copy Share Image
![“A hundred stories [...] Ghosts rising from the dead. Ghosts behind you and in front of you and inside you.” quote by Tim O'Brien](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/cfc/tim-o-brien-1818_ghost_a-hundred-stories-ghosts-rising-from-the_2992809.png)
