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