Tim O'Brien Quotes

When you're in the battlefield, survival is all there is. Death is the only great emotion.

War isn't just about bravery and courage and jingoism and patriotism. It's also fundamentally about grief. And the people that go and do the fighting and the dying are never the people who actually benefit from the fighting and the dying.

Surviving is the only glory in war.

There's nothing but brutality and bravery or cowardice that comes out of war. That's pretty much it.

War is always the same. It is young men dying in the fullness of their promise. It is trying to kill a man that you do not even know well enough to hate. Therefore, to know war is to know that there is still madness in the world.

My subject is war, and the pity of war.

War is hell. You can't photograph a flying bullet, but you can capture genuine fear.

For the most part, everybody who fights in war fights to survive.

Yes, war is hell. It is awful. It involves human beings killing other human beings, sometimes innocent civilians. That is why we despise war.

I couldn't stand the idea of bloodshed, casualties.

For me, at least, Vietnam was partly love. With each step, each light-year of a second, a foot soldier is always almost dead, or so it feels, and in such circumstances, you can't help but love.

Through this same man and me hath all this war been wrought, and the death of the most noblest knights of the world; for through our love that we have loved together is my most noble lord slain.

War is like love; it always finds a way.

War is hell. Hollywood fantasizes about it and makes it look good... war sucks.

War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.

Alas, nothing reveals man the way war does. Nothing so accentuates in him the beauty and ugliness, the intelligence and foolishness, the brutishness and humanity, the courage and cowardice, the enigma.

There is nothing glamorous or romantic about war. It's mostly about random pointless death and misery.

There's no such thing as a crowded battlefield. Battlefields are lonely places.

History could pass for a scarlet text, its jot and title graven red in human blood.

The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.

My mind revolts and my soul cannot support the weight of so much evil: theft, rape, pillage, deaths, and murders, fires and devastation; the virgin violated, the cry of the widow and the orphan; the father armed against his son and each one looking for his brother to kill him; of those who have migrated; of the thousands who have fled; of the bodies stretched out in the public streets; of the bones which cover the fields and of so much blood shed on Venezuela’s soil.

History is a bath of blood.

On the bastion and entrenchments white flags have been placed, the lowering valley is full of dead bodies, and the beautiful sun descends from the transparent sky to the undulating blue sea, which sparkles under the golden rays of the sun. Thousands of people crowd together, look at, speak to, and smile at each other. And these people, who are Christians, confessing one great law of love and self-sacrifice, looking at what they have done, do not suddenly fall with repentance on their knees before Him who has given them life, who has placed in the soul of each, together with the fear of death, the love of the good and beautiful. They do not embrace like brothers with tears of joy and happiness. No! The white flags are lowered, and again whistle the instruments of death and suffering, again flows innocent blood, and groans and curses are heard

War is never cheap or easy.

There's nothing good that comes out of war. It's simply hell on earth, and people survive, and people don't.