Tim O'Brien
Tim O'Brien
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth1 October 1946
CountryUnited States of America
rotary remember forget
But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget.
dream struggle views
A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries.
memories littles sticks
What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end...
fear hangover difficult
With a hangover and with fear, it is difficult to put a helmet on your head.
memories past night
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.
war safe stories
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.
nice ideas hindsight
Everything was such a damned nice idea when it was an idea.
hero waiting leaving
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 to 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.
brother mean remember
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.
thinking trying opinion
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.
memories war writing
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.
feel-good church way
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.
honesty fearless care
If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth.
life running thinking
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.