Tim O'Brien Quotes

I hated the bangs in the war: I always felt a silent war would be more tolerable.

Who had the bigger burden? The one who had to watch the other person endure or the one who endured?

It touched me to be trusted with something terrible.

There is something about killing people at close range that is excruciating. It's bound to try a man's soul.

However, if you listen to me I think you can hear years of abuse in my voice - both bad abuse and good abuse.

Pain leaves a mark, the degree depending on the person and the event.

Oftentimes, discussion of war gets flattened to a discussion of trauma.

I think to be driven to want to kill must be such a terrible burden.

I feel I lost my innocence to cancer.

Writing 'Redeployment' shook me in ways I never expected.

Bambi, to a kid, was scary.

I'm pretty mad at horror films for ruining my childhood.

My first fear was about the devil, when I was around fire, something I saw in a movie. I think it's about pain, in whichever form it comes.

The Kurt thing has burdened me so much.

We manage the fear, I manage the fear, but it certainly takes its toll, the strain does.

I've read and traveled a lot in the Middle East, and I built on eyewitness accounts of horrific executions that would shape a boy's character and beliefs if he watched his father die that way. These are the stuff of which nightmares are made.

Vietnam was my nightmare for a good ten years.

Horror films are very effective to me; they have an impact on me. I think that real life things scare me a lot more.

My grandparents were deeply affected by war, and it was obvious that the men who fought were horribly affected, as were the women who remained at home.

That's the thing about abuse - it can make the victim feel an overwhelming sense of shame, a shame so disabling that one suffers in silence.

That's the worst of a war--you have to go on hearing about it so long.

My guess is that fearful events are the hardest to root out. They're the ones we naturally remember the best, after all.

If you only knew what it did to me to have lived in that house where the police were bursting in to take everyone away! I certainly didn't have a happy and serene childhood.

Sometimes it felt like I was carrying pieces of human flesh back home with me, not negatives. It's as if you are carrying the suffering of the people you have photographed.

Listen up. Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can’t chop down because they’re inside.