He wanted to know her. Intimate secrets: Why poetry? Why so sad? Why that grayness in her eyes? Why so alone? Not lonely, just alone – riding her bike across campus or sitting off by herself in the cafeteria – even dancing, she danced alone – and it was the aloneness that filled him with love.

— Tim O'Brien

Tim O'Brien Quotes

Red and green and silver flares, all colors, and the rain came down in Technicolor.

— Tim O'Brien

In the interests of truth, however, I want to make it clear that Norman Bowker was in no way responsible for what happened to Kiowa. Norman did not experience a failure of nerve that night. He did not freeze up or lose the Silver Star for valor. That part of the story is my own.

— Tim O'Brien

In some respects, though not many, the waiting was worse than the tunnel itself. Imagination was a killer.

— Tim O'Brien

They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor.

— 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.

— Tim O'Brien

Courage was not always a matter of yes or no. Sometimes it came in degrees, like the cold; sometimes you were very brave up to a point and then beyond that point you were not so brave.

— Tim O'Brien

You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference – a powerful, implacable beauty – and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly. To.

— Tim O'Brien

I’m young and happy. I’ll never die.

— Tim O'Brien

On occasions the war was like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put fancy spin on it, you could make it dance.

— Tim O'Brien

Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever.

— Tim O'Brien

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
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