318 Quotes by Tim O'Brien

  • Author Tim O'Brien
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    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.

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  • Author Tim O'Brien
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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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  • Author Tim O'Brien
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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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  • Author Tim O'Brien
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    The presence of danger has a way of making you feel fully awake.

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  • Author Tim O'Brien
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    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.

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  • Author Tim O'Brien
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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.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.

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  • Author Tim O'Brien
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    The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.

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  • Author Tim O'Brien
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    A bullet can kill the enemy, but a bullet can also produce an enemy, depending on whom that bullet strikes.

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