Tim O'Brien Quotes

86 quotes in 1275 categories

• My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead.
• But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.
• That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.
• It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed…
• A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.
• All that peace, man, if felt so good it hurt. I want to hurt it back.
• Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth.
• you can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you…
• The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in…
• Everything was such a damned nice idea when it was an idea.
• 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 remember.
• 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…
• In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war…
• Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got…
• But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget.
• A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.
• A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders,…
• What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end...
• With a hangover and with fear, it is difficult to put a helmet on your head.
• And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads…

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