Tim O Brien Quotes

Each morning, despite the unknowns, they made their legs move.

Don't throw away luck on little stuff. Save it up.

You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.

…he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered. He wanted her to be a virgin and not a virgin all at once. He wanted to know her. Intimate secrets: Why poetry? Why so sad? Why that grayness in her eyes? Why so alone? Not lonely, just alone - riding her bike across campus or sitting off by herself in the cafeteria - even dancing, she danced alone - and it was the aloneness that filled him with love. He remembered telling her that one evening. How she nodded and looked away. And how, later, when he kissed her, she received the kiss without returning it, her eyes wide open, not afraid, not a virgin’s eyes, just flat and uninvolved.

Stories can save us.

Stories are for joining the past to the future.

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.

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