"But the thing about remembering is that you……" — Tim O'Brien
"But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. That's the real obsession. All those stories."
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Tim O'Brien
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87 Quotes by Tim O'Brien
Tim O'Brien has 87 quotes on this site.
A few more worth reading:
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My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living…
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But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to…
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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…
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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…
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The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream…
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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…
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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,…
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More All Quotes
This quote is filed under All Quotes,
one of 128,558 quotes in that category. Here are a few more:
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Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally…
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No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our…
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The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire; all…
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The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes…
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Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of…
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We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and…
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I keep my friends as misers do their treasure, because, of all the things granted us by wisdom, none is…
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We must all make peace so that we can all live in peace.
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The spirit of Ubuntu, that once led Haiti to emerge as the first independent black nation in 1804, helped Venezuela,…
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As we all know, many people remain buried under tons of rubble and debris, waiting to be rescued. When we…
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Wise people, even though all laws were abolished, would still lead the same life.
— Aristophanes
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A friend to all is a friend to none.
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