Tim O'Brien Quotes

Life is a dead-end street.

It's always really funny to watch someone who really wants something who isn't getting it but who's desperate for it.

Charge hell with a bucket of water.

I felt a constant, low-flying desperation, the kind you feel when you are trying, trying, trying to get something you will never, ever get.

When I hear of an 'equity' in a case like this, I am reminded of a blind man in a dark room - looking for a black hat - which isn't there.

Naturally, love's the most distant possibility.

The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.

It's nice that I can go down the road of obsessing over this smiley-face bullshit so maybe I can get free from it and think about something else-it's so banal and yet so crazy!

He was in my hair, my eyes, my fingers, my heart. I day-dreamed about what he was doing, thinking, seeing, smelling, feeling. I could not eat for thoughts of him.

Obsessed? I don't know what the word means. I know there were times when I couldn't think of anything else. I used to stay in every weeknight in the hope that he might get free and call me. It felt like I had a disease I didn't want to get rid of. I suppose that's a definition of obsession, yes.

There's no getting blood out of a turnip.

That's the only place in all the lands we've ever heard of that we don't want to see any closer; and that's the one place we're trying to get to! And that's just where we can't get, nohow.

You will always go into that tent. You will see her scar and wonder where she got it. You will always be amazed at how one woman can have so much black hair. You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast. You will always run away with her. You will always lose her. You will always be a fool. You will always be dead, in a city of ice, snow falling into your ear. You have already done all of this and will do it again.

Life is a continued struggle to be what we are not, and to do what we cannot.

I want to go home. Then he mentally underlined the last sentence three times, rewrote it in huge letters in red ink, and circled it before putting a number of exclamation marks next to it in his mental margin.

I have tried to let you go and I cannot. I cannot stop thinking of you. I cannot stop dreaming about you.

Anything a person chases in life runs away.

He put his cold hands on either side of my face and fixed his golden eyes on mine. "Would you please tell me what you're thinking? Before I go mad?

Fretting springs from a determination to get our own way.

Thinking about spaghetti that boils eternally but is never done is a sad, sad thing.

Wile E. Coyote is a coyote with nothing but good intentions. But Road Runner comes along and is unattainable, he wants it and can't get it, and thus he becomes a villain that is impossible to be around. Bill O'Reilly is a villain that is so in love with himself and the sound of his voice that he's literally become the personification of evil.

Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.

We shall now seek that which we shall not find