But in a story, which is a kind of dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.
Tim O'BrienFiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth.
Tim O'BrienIt was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.
Tim O'BrienA thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.
Tim O'BrienAll that peace, man, if felt so good it hurt. I want to hurt it back.
Tim O'BrienTags: life
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'BrienThe thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.
Tim O'BrienTags: writing
That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.
Tim O'BrienTags: truth writing stories on-fiction fiction
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.
Tim O'BrienTags: war
He'd been coiled like a snake for years and the tension had gone slack and when he was ready to spring the spring wasn't there, but it could be recoiled.
Tim O'BrienTags: experience
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