Top 150 Tim O'Brien Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.”

— Tim O'Brien

Featured in: Quotes About Writing

2. “Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth.”

— Tim O'Brien

3. “They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.”

— Tim O'Brien

4. “I’m not dead. But when I am, it’s likeI don’t know, I guess it’s like being inside a book that nobody’s reading.”

— Tim O'Brien

5. “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”

— Tim O'Brien

6. “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 from where you were to where you are. Stories ar for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”

— Tim O'Brien

7. “I survived, but it’s not a happy ending.”

— Tim O'Brien

8. “Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is.”

— Tim O'Brien

9. “A true war story is never moral...”

— Tim O'Brien

10. “The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.”

— Tim O'Brien

11. “I was a coward. I went to the war.”

— Tim O'Brien

12. “I’m skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story.”

— Tim O'Brien

13. “But this too is true: stories can save us.”

— Tim O'Brien

14. “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 love story.”

— Tim O'Brien

15. “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 story nothing is ever absolutely true.”

— Tim O'Brien

16. “If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.”

— Tim O'Brien

17. “It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid.”

— Tim O'Brien

18. “What happened, and what might have happened?”

— Tim O'Brien

19. “Words, too, have genuine substance – mass and weight and specific gravity.”

— Tim O'Brien

20. “What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end...”

— Tim O'Brien

21. “Imagination is a killer.”

— Tim O'Brien

22. “Every dark cloud may well have its silver lining, but I have come to learn that every silver lining has its dark consequences.”

— Tim O'Brien

23. “There should be a law, I though. If you support a war, if you think it’s worth the price, that’s fine, but you he to put your own precious fluids on the line. You have to head for the front and hook up with an infantry unit and help spill the blood. And you have to bring along your wife, or your kids, or your lover. A law, I thought.”

— Tim O'Brien

24. “They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak.”

— Tim O'Brien

25. “War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.”

— Tim O'Brien

26. “Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones – THAT kind of love.”

— Tim O'Brien

27. “My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead.”

— Tim O'Brien

28. “But the thing about remembering is that you don’t forget.”

— Tim O'Brien

29. “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 brave as he wanted to be. The distinction was important.”

— Tim O'Brien

30. “In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.”

— Tim O'Brien

31. “What would you do? Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you’re leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?”

— Tim O'Brien

32. “A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.”

— Tim O'Brien

33. “You can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead.”

— Tim O'Brien

34. “It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.”

— Tim O'Brien

35. “Let the story tell itself.”

— Tim O'Brien

36. “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 really quiet, expect there’s still this sound you can’t hear.”

— Tim O'Brien

37. “Writing doesn’t get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write.”

— Tim O'Brien

38. “They were afraid of dying, but they were even more afraid to show it.”

— Tim O'Brien

39. “They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing – these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.”

— Tim O'Brien

40. “Everything was such a damned nice idea when it was an idea.”

— Tim O'Brien

41. “Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. 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 from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”

— Tim O'Brien

42. “Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.”

— Tim O'Brien

43. “It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid. When you’re afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world. You make close friends. You become part of a tribe and you share the same blood- you give it together, you take it together.”

— Tim O'Brien

44. “The things they carried were largely determined by necessity.”

— Tim O'Brien

45. “Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are.”

— Tim O'Brien

46. “Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever.”

— Tim O'Brien

47. “Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost.”

— Tim O'Brien

48. “The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.”

— Tim O'Brien

49. “A giddy feeling, in a way, except there was the dreamy edge of impossibility to it – like running a dead-end maze – no way out – it couldn’t come to a happy conclusion and yet I was doing it anyway because it was all I could think of to do.”

— Tim O'Brien

50. “A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.”

— Tim O'Brien