Tim O'Brien Quotes

86 quotes in 1275 categories

• But I do like churches. The way it feels inside. It feels good when you just sit there, like you're in a forest and everything's…
• I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.
• He wished he could've explained some of this. How he had been braver than he ever thought possible, but how he had not been so…
• You don't know. When I'm out there at night I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving, my skin and…
• He had an opinion of himself, I think, that was too high for his own good. Or maybe it was the reverse. Maybe it was…
• ...you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled…
• A miracle to confound natural law, a baffling reversal of the inevitable consequences . . . a miracle. . . . An act of high…
• In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes…
• It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite; he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would…
• A place where your life exists before you live it, and where it goes afterwards.
• A lot like yesterday, a lot like never.
• [Y]ou can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.
• What happened, and what might have happened?
• ...his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered.
• They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.
• It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.
• I survived, but it's not a happy ending.
• 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. It was a…
• ...precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated.
• The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.

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