Tim O'Brien
Tim O'Brien
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth1 October 1946
CountryUnited States of America
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.
stories want sometimes
I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.
brave important distinction
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.
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.
fiction-stories fiction sufficient
That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.
truth lying may
A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.
real war dirty
you can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. 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. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty.
inspirational dream memories
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.
nice ideas hindsight
Everything was such a damned nice idea when it was an idea.
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.
color rivers finding-yourself
...you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.
stories
Let the story tell itself.
years body nine
Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones - THAT kind of love.
years adults body
Linda was nine then, as I was, but we were in love...it had all the shadings and complexities of mature adult love and maybe more, because there were not yet words for it, and because it was not yet fixed to comparisons or chronologies or the ways by which adults measure such things...I just loved her. Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones -- that kind of love.