Tim O'Brien
Tim O'Brien
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth1 October 1946
CountryUnited States of America
alive
you're never more alive than when you're almost dead.
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.
girl college light
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.
memories grief men
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. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.
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.
hurt men want
All that peace, man, if felt so good it hurt. I want to hurt it back.
might happened
What happened, and what might have happened?
sleep blood his-love
...his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered.
bears silent terrible
They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.
war grief thinking
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.
land water together
...precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated.
memories heart world
The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.
weight substance gravity
Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.