Top 150 Tim O'Brien Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you’d find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.”

— Tim O'Brien

52. “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 this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.”

— Tim O'Brien

53. “They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.”

— Tim O'Brien

54. “It was the burden of being alive. Awkwardly, the men would reassemble themselves, first in private, then in groups, becoming soldiers again. They would repair the leaks in their eyes. They would check for casualties, call in dustoffs, light cigarettes, try to smile, clear their throats and spit and begin cleaning their weapons.”

— Tim O'Brien

55. “In a true war story, if there’s a moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth. You can’t tease it out. You can’t extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there’s nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe “Oh.” True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis. For.”

— Tim O'Brien

56. “Don’t throw away luck on little stuff. Save it up.”

— Tim O'Brien

57. “And as a writer now, I want to save Linda’s life. Not her body – her life.”

— Tim O'Brien

58. “All that peace, man, if felt so good it hurt. I want to hurt it back.”

— Tim O'Brien

59. “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 history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted or believed in. You know you’re about to die. And it’s not a movie and you aren’t a hero and all you can do is whimper and wait.”

— Tim O'Brien

60. “In the interests of truth, however, I want to make it clear that Norman Bowker was in no way responsible for what happened to Kiowa. Norman did not experience a failure of nerve that night. He did not freeze up or lose the Silver Star for valor. That part of the story is my own.”

— Tim O'Brien

61. “Because it’s all relative. You’re pinned down in some filthy hellhole of a paddy, getting your ass delivered to kingdom come, but then for a few seconds everything goes quiet and you look up and see the sun and a few puffy white clouds, and the immense serenity flashes against your eyeballs – the whole world gets rearranged – and even though you’re pinned down by a war you’ve never felt more at peace.”

— Tim O'Brien

62. “But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.”

— Tim O'Brien

63. “Courage was not always a matter of yes or no. Sometimes it came in degrees, like the cold; sometimes you were very brave up to a point and then beyond that point you were not so brave.”

— Tim O'Brien

64. “Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons.”

— Tim O'Brien

65. “First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rusack. In the late afternoon, after a day’s march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending.”

— Tim O'Brien

66. “With a hangover and with fear, it is difficult to put a helmet on your head.”

— Tim O'Brien

67. “Once someone’s dead you can’t make them undead.”

— Tim O'Brien

68. “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 feel exactly what he felt.”

— Tim O'Brien

69. “I live in my head all day long and the world is a little dreamy.”

— Tim O'Brien

70. “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 out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.”

— Tim O'Brien

71. “Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.”

— Tim O'Brien

72. “They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture.”

— Tim O'Brien

73. “Looking back after twenty years, I sometimes wonder if the events of that summer didn’t happen in some other dimension, a place where your life exists before you’ve lived it, and where it goes afterward.”

— Tim O'Brien

74. “Whenever he told the story, Rat had a tendency to stop now and then, interrupting the flow, inserting little clarifications or bits of analysis and personal opinion. It was a bad habit, Mitchell Sanders said, because all that matters is the raw material, the stuff itself, and you can’t clutter it up with your own half-baked commentary. That just breaks the spell. It destroys the magic. What you have to do, Sanders said, is trust your own story. Get the hell out of the way and let it tell itself.”

— Tim O'Brien

75. “The things they carried were determined to some extent by superstition.”

— Tim O'Brien

76. “It’s not just the embarrassment of tears. That’s part of it, no doubt, but what embarrasses me much more, and always will, is the paralysis that took my heart. A moral freeze: I couldn’t decide, I couldn’t act, I couldn’t comport myself with even a pretense of modest human dignity.”

— Tim O'Brien

77. “There was the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.”

— Tim O'Brien

78. “The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.”

— Tim O'Brien

79. “On occasions the war was like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put fancy spin on it, you could make it dance.”

— Tim O'Brien

80. “It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that’s all it was. And right then I submitted. I would go to the war – I would kill and maybe die – because I was embarrassed not to.”

— Tim O'Brien

81. “A lot like yesterday, a lot like never.”

— Tim O'Brien

82. “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 a low opinion that he kept trying to erase.”

— Tim O'Brien

83. “There were red checkers and black checkers. The playing field was laid out in a strict grid, no tunnels or mountains or jungles. You knew where you stood. You knew the score. The pieces were out on the board, the enemy was visible, you could watch the tactics unfolding into larger strategies. There was a winner and a loser. There were rules.”

— Tim O'Brien

84. “I hated him for making me stop hating him.”

— Tim O'Brien

85. “If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth.”

— Tim O'Brien

86. “I cannot remember much, I cannot feel much. Maybe erasure is necessary. Maybe the human spirit defends itself as the body does, attacking infection, enveloping and destroying those malignancies that would otherwise consume us.”

— Tim O'Brien

87. “Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.”

— Tim O'Brien

88. “They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness. Greased they’d say. Offed, lit up, zapped while zipping. It wasn’t cruelty, just stage presence. They were actors. When someone died, it wasn’t quite dying, because in a curious way it seemed scripted, and because they had their lives mostly memorized, irony mixed with tragedy, and because they called it by other names, as if to encyst and destroy the reality of death itself.”

— Tim O'Brien

89. “He hated her. Yes, he did. He hated her. Love, too, but it was a hard, hating kind of love.”

— Tim O'Brien

90. “You learn, finally, that you’ll die, and so you try to hang on to your own life, that gentle, naive kid you used to be, but then after a while the sentiment takes over, and the sadness, because you know for a fact that you can’t ever bring any of it back again. You just can’t.”

— Tim O'Brien

91. “A place where your life exists before you live it, and where it goes afterwards.”

— Tim O'Brien

92. “The presence of danger has a way of making you feel fully awake.”

— Tim O'Brien

93. “If you don’t care for obscenity, you don’t care for the truth; if you don’t care for the truth, watch how you vote.”

— Tim O'Brien

94. “Each of us, I suppose needs his illusions. Life after death. A maker of planets. A woman to love, a man to hate. Something sacred. But what a waste.”

— Tim O'Brien

95. “They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor.”

— Tim O'Brien

96. “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.”

— Tim O'Brien

97. “We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it and guard it and hold it forever inaccessible.”

— Tim O'Brien

98. “In a way I wanted to stop myself. It was cruel, I knew that, but right and wrong were somewhere else.”

— Tim O'Brien

99. “Did I choose this life of illusion? Don’t be mad. My bed was made, I just lied in it.”

— Tim O'Brien

100. “It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.”

— Tim O'Brien