Tim O'Brien Quotes
86 quotes
in 1275 categories
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My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead.
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But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.
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That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.
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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…
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A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.
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All that peace, man, if felt so good it hurt. I want to hurt it back.
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Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth.
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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…
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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…
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Everything was such a damned nice idea when it was an idea.
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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.
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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…
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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…
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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…
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But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget.
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A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.
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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,…
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What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end...
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With a hangover and with fear, it is difficult to put a helmet on your head.
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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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