The Best Tim ‘Brien quotes

They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried. — Tim O

I survived, but it’s not a happy ending. — Tim O

But this too is true: stories can save us. — Tim O

Words, too, have genuine substance––mass and weight and specific gravity. — Tim O

But in a story I can steal her soul. — Tim O

A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written. — Tim O

All that peace, man, if felt so good it hurt. I want to hurt it back. — Tim O

But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world. — Tim O

The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory. — Tim O

They were afraid of dieing, but they were even more afraid to show it. — Tim O

Precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated. — Tim O

And as a writer now, I want to save Linda’s life. Not her body––her life. — Tim O

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

Once someone’s dead you can’t make them undead. — Tim O

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story–truth is truer sometimes than happening–truth. — Tim O

Imagination, like reality, has its limits. — Tim O

The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, repaying itself over and over. — Tim O

What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end… — Tim O

But the thing about remembering is that you don’t forget. — Tim O

You’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. — Tim O

He had an opinion of himself, I think, that was too high for his own good. Or maybe it was the reverse. Maybe it was a low opinion that he kept trying to erase. — Tim O

Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth. — Tim O

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

Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons. — Tim O

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

Even then, at nine years old, I wanted to live inside her body. I wanted to melt into her bones–THAT kind of love. — Tim O

A lot like yesterday, a lot like never. — Tim O

A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. — Tim O