("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.

Tim O'Brien

Categorized in : Father Love You Husband

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.

Tim O'Brien

stories helping facts

It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.

Tim O'Brien

very-sad felt men

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.

Tim O'Brien

dream inspirational memories

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

Tim O'Brien

stories want sometimes

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.

Tim O'Brien

views mistake war

Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth.

Tim O'Brien

helping lying fiction

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.

Tim O'Brien

night memories past

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.

Tim O'Brien

vivid inspirational way

[Y]ou can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

Tim O'Brien

evil stories war

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.

Tim O'Brien

emotional grief memories

Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.

Tim O'Brien

embarrassed men war

Laughter does not deny pain. Laughter - like a wail - acknowledges and replies to pain.

Tim O'Brien

laughter pain doe

When your afraid,reallyafraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world.

Tim O'Brien

pay attention world

Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is.

Tim O'Brien

storytelling situation essentials

What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end.

Tim O'Brien

sticks littles memories

If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth.

Tim O'Brien

fearless honesty care

Why do our politicians put warnings on cigarette packs and not on their own foreheads?

Tim O'Brien

cigarette politician warning

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.

Tim O'Brien

fun love war

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.

Tim O'Brien

coward eye fall

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.

Tim O'Brien

fiction-stories sufficient fiction