Tim O'Brien
Tim O'Brien
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth1 October 1946
CountryUnited States of America
eye kissing numbness
... when he kissed her, she received the kiss without returning it, her eyes wide open, not afraid, not a virgin's eyes, just flat and uninvolved.
fall eye coward
They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.
war eye ducks
In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. .. The pictures get jumbled, you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.
cherish close ghost hometown life midwest present values window
Place is so important to me. The Midwest is like a ghost in my life. It's present as I look out the window now. I see Texas, but if I close my eyes and look out the same window, I'm back in my hometown in Worthington, Minnesota, and I cherish those values and that diction.
extremely land maps meant misleading villages
Pinkville was called Pinkville because in the military maps, it was shaded a bright kind of shimmering pink, which signified what was called on the maps a 'built up' area, which was extremely misleading - 'built up' only meant there were little villages and it wasn't just desolate paddy land or unpopulated.
call civilian farmer helping housewife might traps war
Who do you call a civilian in a guerilla war? I mean, it might be a farmer by day or a merchant, a housewife, and by night the housewife may be helping to make landmines and booby traps and who knows.
daughter exclude luck wish
It does not exclude him from the process, and we wish his daughter luck.
movies none novels tales
Why do fairy tales exist, and why do movies exist? Why do novels exist? There has to be a reason for it; otherwise, none of these things would be there.
courage harder physical
I learned that moral courage is harder than physical courage.
bad close detail marriage paying
When you're so close to material, it would be as if you had come out of a bad marriage. You would be so close to it that you would be paying attention to detail that may not mean a whole lot for the reader.
allow beneath disappear failings minnesota people stay unlike veil
Unlike Chicago or New York, small-town Minnesota did not allow a man's failings to disappear beneath a veil of numbers. People talked. Secrets did not stay secret.
cowboy good image lighter surprised
I've been surprised by Austin. I had a cowboy image of the place. It's a pretty sophisticated city - in some ways, more sophisticated than Boston. And there's a lighter feel to the place. It's very good for my spirits.
death grieving involve sons wars
At the bottom, all wars are the same because they involve death and maiming and wounding, and grieving mothers, fathers, sons and daughters.
inside nonfiction putting stories
Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you.