Quotes by Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

Explore a curated collection of 35 quotes by Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried. Discover timeless wisdom, insightful thoughts, and memorable words that have inspired readers around the world. Browse through the gallery below and click on any quote to read more.

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What s — Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
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 — Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
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 — Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes rem — Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior — Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect — Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
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 y — Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spin — Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
I was a coward. I went to the war. — Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel-the spiritual texture-of a great ghostly — Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp an — Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey — Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core — Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
They would repair the leaks in their eyes. — Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. — Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
I hated him for making me stop hating him — Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness. Greased they'd say. Offed, lit up, zapped while zipping. I — Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards. — Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
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 — Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
It was a flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher, spinning off the edge of the earth and — Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried