Tim O'Brien
Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth.Collection: Lying
I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.Collection: Stories
That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.Collection: Fiction Stories
If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.Collection: War
If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth.Collection: Honesty
War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Stories
Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.Collection: War
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.Collection: Dream
A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Memories
It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.Collection: Men
Why do our politicians put warnings on cigarette packs and not on their own foreheads?Collection: Warning
When your afraid,reallyafraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world.Collection: Attention
Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.Collection: Substance
But this too is true: stories can save us.Collection: Stories
It's a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn't felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid.Collection: Inspirational
It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.Collection: War
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.Collection: Memories
Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones - THAT kind of love.Collection: Years
Even now, as I write this, I can still feel that tightness. And I want you to feel it--the wind coming off the river, the waves, the silence, the wooded frontier. You're at the bow of a boat on the Rainy River. You're twenty-one years old, you're scared, and there's a hard squeezing pressure in your chest. 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?Collection: Dream
I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.Collection: Moving
you're never more alive than when you're almost dead.Collection: Alive
There is always the threat of tomorrow's treachery, or next year's treachery, or the treachery implicit in all the tomorrows beyond that.Collection: Years
But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget.Collection: Rotary
("I love you," someone says, and instantly we begin to wonder - "Well, how much?" - and when the answer comes - "With my whole heart" - we then wonder about the wholeness of a fickle heart.) Our lovers, our husbands, our wives, our fathers, our gods - they are all beyond us.Collection: Husband
Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.Collection: War
I was a coward. I went to the war.Collection: War
They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.Collection: Sky
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.Collection: Wall
Well, right now I'm not dead. But when I am, it's like...I don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading. [...] An old one. It's up on a library shelf, so you're safe and everything, but the book hasn't been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody'll pick it up and start reading.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Brother
You don't know. When I'm out there at night I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving, my skin and fingernails, everything, it's like I'm full of electricity and I'm glowing in the dark - I'm on fire almost - I'm burning away into nothing - but it doesn't matter because I know exactly who I am.Collection: Moving
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.Collection: Real
It's not just the embarrassment of tears. That's part of it, no doubt, but what embarrasses me much more, and always will, is the paralysis that took my heart. A moral freeze: I couldn't decide, I couldn't act, I couldn't comport myself with even a pretense of modest human dignity.Collection: Heart
But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. That's the real obsession. All those stories.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Feel Good
They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.Collection: Bears
Imagination, like reality, has its limits.Collection: Reality
...precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated.Collection: Land
In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.Collection: War
...his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered.Collection: Sleep
But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.Collection: Dream
What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end.Collection: Memories
It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid. When you’re afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world. You make close friends. You become part of a tribe and you share the same blood- you give it together, you take it together.Collection: Blood
...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.Collection: Color
Everything was such a damned nice idea when it was an idea.Collection: Nice
Writing doesn’t get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write.Collection: Writing