Tim O'Brien
Tim O'Brien
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth1 October 1946
CountryUnited States of America
essentials storytelling situation
Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is.
life-is one-thing my-own-life
Life is never all one thing. It bounces around. Certainly, my own life has.
years bigs feels
Inside I feel much like a 12-year-old or a 17-year-old who knows big words.
want body power-of-stories
And as a writer now, I want to save Linda's life. Not her body--her life.
soul stories stealing
But in a story I can steal her soul.
stories true-story
But this too is true: stories can save us.
dream world return
But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.
stories facts helping
By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.
dream hurt thinking
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?
alive
you're never more alive than when you're almost dead.
blood reason uncertain
Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons.
years next-year tomorrow
There is always the threat of tomorrow's treachery, or next year's treachery, or the treachery implicit in all the tomorrows beyond that.
wall forever wish
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.
undead
Once someone's dead you can't make them undead.