Tim O'brien said this quote

“ Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel-the spiritual texture-of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity. ”

Famous Quotes of Tim O'brien

Famous quotes of Tim O'brien from the classy quote

See all

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

~ Tim O'brien

A thing may happen and be a total lie, another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.

~ Tim O'brien

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

~ Tim O'brien

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. .. The pictures get jumbled, you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.

~ Tim O'brien