"Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier,……" — Tim O'Brien
"Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel-the spiritual texture-of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity."
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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.
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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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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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