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47e8fa9
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Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones - THAT kind of love.
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Tim O'Brien |
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0817240
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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?
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Tim O'Brien |
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9640a83
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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 t..
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Tim O'Brien |
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2e3ca2d
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You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, 'Is it true?' and if the answer matters, you've got your answer . . . Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.
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Tim O'Brien |
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d478cb5
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All of us, I suppose, like to believe that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth, bravely and forthrightly, without thought of personal loss or discredit. Certainly that was my conviction back in the summer of 1968. Tim O'Brien: a secret hero. The Lone Ranger. If the stakes ever became high enough--if the evil were evil enough, if the good were good enough--I would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage that had..
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cowardice
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Tim O'Brien |
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e9eb7d4
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Imagination, like reality, has its limits.
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reality
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Tim O'Brien |
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a521102
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he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered. He wanted her to be a virgin and not a virgin all at once. 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. He remembered ..
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the-things-they-carried
tim-o-brien
virgin
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Tim O'Brien |
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43ffb7b
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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."
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Tim O'Brien |
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68e7b9f
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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 dream..
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Tim O'Brien |
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47fa367
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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. They died so as not to die of embarrassment.
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Tim O'Brien |
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90c25db
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I cannot remember much, I cannot feel much. Maybe erasure is necessary. Maybe the human spirit defends itself as the body does, attacking infection, enveloping and destroying those malignancies that would otherwise consume us.
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Tim O'Brien |
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1015b6e
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Once someone's dead you can't make them undead.
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Tim O'Brien |
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95d1d28
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When your afraid,reallyafraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world.
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Tim O'Brien |
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5392f4a
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But in a story, which is a type of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.
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Tim O'Brien |
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d7bef69
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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.
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Tim O'Brien |
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5135070
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precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated.
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Tim O'Brien |
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9e6d8ca
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The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, repaying itself over and over.
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Tim O'Brien |
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1603316
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And as a writer now, I want to save Linda's life. Not her body--her life.
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Tim O'Brien |
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b440bdd
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The town could not talk, and would not listen. "How'd you like to hear about the war?" he might have asked, but the place could only blink and shrug. It had no memory, therefore no guilt. The taxes got paid and the votes got counted and the agencies of government did their work briskly and politely. It was a brisk, polite town. It did not know shit about shit, and did not care to know. "
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Tim O'Brien |
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310edef
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There was the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.
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Tim O'Brien |
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fcc3eda
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I detested their blind, thoughtless, automatic acquiescence to it all, their simpleminded patriotism, their prideful ignorance, their love-it-or-leave-it platitudes, how they were sending me off to a war they didn't understand and didn't want to understand. I held them responsible. By God, yes, I did. All of them - I held them personally and individually responsible - the polyestered Kiwanis boys, the merchants and the farmers, the pious ch..
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war
vietnam
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Tim O'Brien |
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93d3e29
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What stories can do, I guess, is make things present. I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.
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writing
stories
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Tim O'Brien |
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0e40a89
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Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel-the spiritual texture-of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, o..
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war
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Tim O'Brien |
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60cb12a
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They were afraid of dieing, but they were even more afraid to show it.
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Tim O'Brien |
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131bdf3
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Because it's all relative. You're pinned down in some filthy hellhole of a paddy, getting your ass delivered to kingdom come, but then for a few seconds everything goes quiet and you look up and see the sun and a few puffy white clouds, and the immense serenity flashes against your eyeballs - the whole world gets rearranged - and even though you're pinned down by a war you've never felt more at peace.
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Tim O'Brien |
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bfef453
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Imagination is a killer.
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Tim O'Brien |
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ede646e
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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 they 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 a victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rec..
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Tim O'Brien |
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10c8dfb
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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.
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Tim O'Brien |
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67cd181
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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 pre..
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war
love
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Tim O'Brien |
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273dd1a
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Sometimes the bravest thing in the world was to sit through the night and feel the cold in your bones.
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Tim O'Brien |
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439576b
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Do we choose sleep? Hell no and bullshit - we fall. We give ourselves over to possibility, to whim and fancy, to the bed, to the pillow, the tiny white tablet. And these choose for us.
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sleep
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Tim O'Brien |
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453d28f
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It is easy, of course, to fear happiness. There is often complacency in the acceptance of misery. We fear parting from our familiar roles. We fear the consequences of such a parting. We fear happiness because we fear failure. But we must overcome these fears. We must be brave. It is one thing to speculate about what might be. It is quite another to act in behalf of our dreams, to treat them as objectives that are achievable and worth achiev..
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Tim O'Brien |
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a836039
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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 ..
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war
embarrassment
shame
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Tim O'Brien |
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51dd1b4
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How crazy it was that people who were so incredibly alive could get so incredibly dead
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Tim O'Brien |
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c1d8cef
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There should be a law, I though. If you support a war, if you think it's worth the price, that's fine, but you he to put your own precious fluids on the line. You have to head for the front and hook up with an infantry unit and help spill the blood. And you have to bring along your wife, or your kids, or your lover. A law, I thought.
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Tim O'Brien |
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149c19f
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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 barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect..
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Tim O'Brien |
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9a9a849
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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.
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Tim O'Brien |
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9dbfbee
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Y]ou can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.
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Tim O'Brien |
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f162cad
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It was a flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher, spinning off the edge of the earth and beyond the sun and through the vast silent vacuum where there were no burdens and where everything weighed exactly nothing.
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happy
freedom
inspiration
living
happiness
life
love
inspirational
flying
book
fly
falling
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Tim O'Brien |
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31aa162
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Most of this I've told before, or at least hinted at, but what I have never told is the full truth. How I cracked. How at work one morning, standing on the pig line, I felt something break open in my chest. I don't know what it was. I'll never know. But it was real, I know that much, it was a physical rapture--a cracking-leaking-popping feeling. I remember dropping my water gun. Quickly, almost without thought, I took off my apron and walke..
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Tim O'Brien |
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61fa9bf
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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.
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Tim O'Brien |
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90d5c8e
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Story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.
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Tim O'Brien |
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1c53e68
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Still there was so much to say. How the rain never stopped. How the cold worked into your bones. Sometimes the bravest thing on earth was to sit through the night and feel the cold in your bones. 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. In certain situations you could do incredible things, you could..
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Tim O'Brien |
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f67772d
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It occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. 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, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but th..
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Tim O'Brien |