Quotes by Tim O'Brien

“Well, right now Im not dead. But when I am, its like...I dont know, I guess its like being inside a book that nobodys reading. [...] An old one. Its up on a library shelf, so youre safe and everything, but the book hasnt been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebodyll pick it up and start reading.”

“It was a flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher, spinning off the edge of the earth and beyond the sun and through the vast silent vacuum where there were no burdens and where everything weighed exactly nothing.”

“It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid. When you’re afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world. You make close friends. You become part of a tribe and you share the same blood- you give it together, you take it together.”

“Words, too, have genuine substance -- mass and weight and specific gravity.”