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Tim OBrien Quotes about Memories

All Tim O'Brien Quotes Dying Heart Hurt Imagination Leaving Lying Memories quotes War Writing
Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories ar for eternity, when memory is erased,

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories ar for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

Tim O'Brien
Memories, Past, Night
Tim O'Brien (1990). “The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction”

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.

Tim O'Brien
Inspirational, Dream, Memories
Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.218, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.

Tim O'Brien
Memories, Grief, Emotional
Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.20, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end.

Tim O'Brien
Memories, Littles, Sticks
Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.34, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.

Tim O'Brien
Memories, War, Writing
Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.81, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The world shrieks and sinks talons into our hearts. This we call memory.

Tim O'Brien
Memories, Heart, World
Tim O'Brien (2011). “Tomcat in Love”, p.4, Broadway Books

But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget. You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you. That's the real obsession. All those stories.

Tim O'Brien
Memories, Real, Past
Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.33, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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