In February 1969, 25 years ago, I arrived as a young, terrified PFC on this lonely little hill in Quang Ngai Province. Back then, the place seemed huge and imposing and permanent. Tim O'Brien More Quotes by Tim O'Brien More Quotes From Tim O'Brien you're never more alive than when you're almost dead. Tim O'Brien alive Each of us, I suppose needs his illusions. Life after death. A maker of planets. A woman to love, a man to hate. Something sacred. But what a waste. Tim O'Brien hate men needs 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. Tim O'Brien stories war lying For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe. Tim O'Brien squares roots thinking 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. Tim O'Brien body spirit doe 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. Tim O'Brien brother remember mean 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. Tim O'Brien real war dirty 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. Tim O'Brien struggle views dream My life is storytelling. I believe in stories, in their incredible power to keep people alive, to keep the living alive, and the dead. Tim O'Brien stories believe people A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written. Tim O'Brien sometimes lying fiction But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget. Tim O'Brien rotary forget remember It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite; he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt. Tim O'Brien opposites hot lying A place where your life exists before you live it, and where it goes afterwards. Tim O'Brien In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it's safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true. Tim O'Brien safe stories war Let the story tell itself. Tim O'Brien stories ...precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated. Tim O'Brien land together water Everything was such a damned nice idea when it was an idea. Tim O'Brien hindsight nice ideas I'll picture Rat Kiley face, his grief, and I'll think, You dumb cooze. Because she wasn't listening. It wasn't a war story. It was a love story. Tim O'Brien grief war thinking I survived, but it's not a happy ending. Tim O'Brien rainy happy-endings life ...his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered. Tim O'Brien his-love sleep blood
