The essential object of fiction is not to explain. Explanation narrows. Explanation fixes. Explanation dissolves mystery. Explanation imposes artificial, arrogant order on human contradictions between fact and fact. The essential object of fiction is to embrace and widen and deepen all that is unknown and unknowable – who we are, why we are – and to offer us late-night company as we lie awake pondering our universal journey down the birth canal, and out into the light, and then toward the grave.

— Tim O'Brien

Tim O'Brien Quotes

But this, too, was a performance.

— Tim O'Brien

That’s a true story that never happened.

— Tim O'Brien

I am forever astonished at the longevity of childhood. How it never ends. How we are what we were. How turtles and engines and stolen kisses leave their jet trail across our gaping lives.

— Tim O'Brien

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.

— Tim O'Brien

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. 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. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue.

— Tim O'Brien

Sun and waves and gentle winds, all love and lightness.

— Tim O'Brien

We find truth inside, or not at all.

— Tim O'Brien

It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.

— Tim O'Brien

If inner peace is the true objective, would I win it in exile?

— Tim O'Brien

Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive when you’re almost dead.

— Tim O'Brien

This book is essentially different from any other that has been published concerning the “late war” or any of its incidents. Those who have had any such experience as the author will see its truthfulness at once, and to all other readers it is commended as a statement of actual things by one who experienced them to the fullest.

— Tim O'Brien

They wanted happiness without knowing what it was, or where to look, which made them want it all the more.

— Tim O'Brien

The whole world worked by subterfuge and the will to believe.

— Tim O'Brien

I hope so. Except I’m afraid to look at myself. Literally. I can’t even look at my own eyes in the mirror, not for long. I’m afraid I won’t be there.

— Tim O'Brien

Large effects might come from small causes.

— Tim O'Brien

Maybe it’s a crackpot theory, but in the aftermath of my sickness, I’ve often wondered if what we call insanity might be a biological response to mankind’s consciousness of its own mortality, a way of unknowing what we know, a defense against the specter of nothingness and foreverness and intolerable finality.

— Tim O'Brien

For just as happiness is more than the absence of sadness, so peace is infinitely more than the absence of war.

— Tim O'Brien

You have taken many risks. You have been brave beyond your wildest expectations. And now it is time for a final act of courage. I urge you: March proudly into your own dream.

— Tim O'Brien

The essential object of fiction is not to explain. Explanation narrows. Explanation fixes. Explanation dissolves mystery. Explanation imposes artificial, arrogant order on human contradictions between fact and fact. The essential object of fiction is to embrace and widen and deepen all that is unknown and unknowable – who we are, why we are – and to offer us late-night company as we lie awake pondering our universal journey down the birth canal, and out into the light, and then toward the grave.

— Tim O'Brien

In the field, though, the causes were immediate. A moment of carelessness or bad judgment or plain stupidity carried consequences that lasted forever.

— Tim O'Brien
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