Tim O'Brien Quotes

I'm not dead. But when I am, it's likeI don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading.

Tell me the truth about death. I don't know what it is. We have them, then they are gone but they stay in our minds. Their stories are part of us as long as we live and as long as we tell them or write them down.

On that night I was left with only the truth that nothing of our personality survives after death, that in the end all that was Misha Vainberg would evaporate along with the styles and delusions of his epoch, leaving behind not one flutter of his sad heavy brilliance, not one damp spot around which his successors could congregate to appreciate his life and times.

I think Willa Cather did a short story called "Paul's Case," and in it, when he finally commits suicide, it says, "He surrendered to the black design of things." And that's what I anticipate death will be: a totally unconscious void in which you float through eternity with no particular consciousness of anything. I think once around is enough. I don't want to start it all over again.

What do people fear most about death? I asked the reb. "Fear?" he thought for a moment. 'Well, for one thing, what happens next? Where do we go? Is it what we imagined?" That's big. "Yes. But there's something else." What else? He leaned forward. "Being forgotten," he whispered.

If i thought i was replying to someone who would every return to the world, this flame would cease it's flickering. But since no one has returned from these depths alive, if what I've heard is true, I will answer you without fear of infamy.

Nothing is more dreadful in life than the profound thought that death may only greet you with eternal nothingness.

I figure I basically am a ghost. I think we all are.

They say in the grave there is peace, and peace and the grave are one and the same.

I hadn't originally intended to do any reading, what if I did read one book more or one book less, whether I read or not wouldn't make a difference, I would still be waiting to get cremated.

Son. Everyone dies alone. That's what it is. It's a door. It's one person wide. When you go through it, you do it alone. But it doesn't mean you've got to be alone before you go through the door. And believe me, you aren't alone on the other side.

What does it mean to be born? After we die, will it be the same thing as it was before we were born? Or a different kind of nothingness? Because there might be knowledge then. Memory.

In the end, living is defined by dying. Book-ended by oblivion, we are caught in the vice of terror, squeezed to bursting by the approaching end. Fear is ever-present, waiting to be called to the surface. Change brought fear, and fear brought destruction.

I shudder to think of an eternity spend without books. I have hopes that every book that was ever lost is somewhere waiting for me when my life here finally ends.

In contravention of my belief that any life ending in death is essentially pointless, I needed my friends to open up that plastic bag and take one last look at me. Someone had to remember me, if only for a few more minutes in the vast silent waiting room of time.

I don't really think it will make much difference to me when I'm dead whether I'm read or not . . . just as whether I'm dead or not won't mean much to me when I'm dead.

Does anything really matter? We all end up in the same place. All that's left is our Wikipedia entry.

You weren't put on earth to be remembered. You were put here to prepare for eternity.

The great majority gave no signs one way or the other; like birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting.

So when I'm killed, don't wait for me, Walking the dim corridor; In Heaven or Hell, don't wait for me, Or you must wait for evermore. You'll find me buried, living-dead In these verses that you've read.

We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing.

Being dead will be no different from being unborn -- I shall be just as I was in the time of William the Conqueror or the dinosaurs or the trilobites. There is nothing to fear in that.

Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to Hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularized version of Heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism.

Stretched out in front of me was my time as an adult, and then a skeleton, and then nothing except perhaps a few books on a few shelves.

You will die and it will all be over. You will die and find out everything or cease asking.