O Brien Quotes

The rule of mirrors. So many possibilities. We seek until we find a true reflection of ourselves, ~ Caragh M. O'Brien

They would get their shit together, and keep it together, and maintain it neatly and in good working order. ~ Tim O'Brien

Don't throw away luck on little stuff. Save it up. ~ Tim O'Brien

My gaze drifts up again to the break in the wall and the night sky beyond it. 'So why call this the Keep of Ages?' I ask.
'Maybe they hoped it would stand forever,' Linus says. 'It's about timelessness.'
'Immortality,' Burnham says.
I smile. 'Ironic, isn't it, since it's crumbling? ~ Caragh M. O'Brien

It isn't always easy between us. I admit that. But it's right between us, always. ~ Caragh M. O'Brien

Men are accustomed to making objective assessments of devastating situations, as long as they are not immersed in them. Rare is he who maintains objectivity in the midst of personal affliction. ~ Michael D. O'Brien

Since I was a kid. I had this series by Ballantine Books about the history of World Wars I and II. In my 20s, it was the Vietnam War literature of novelists like Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, and Tobias Wolff, and then nonfiction such as "A Bright Shining Lie" by Neil Sheehan and "The Best and Brightest" by David Halberstam . Those are the two best histories of Vietnam. ~ George Packer

You look like a decent young man."
Leon didn't smile. "I'm not. ~ Caragh M. O'Brien

He couldn't even find the will to yell at her now. A real man didn't yell at those who weren't exactly sane themselves, he told himself. ~ Lora Leigh

For a moment, the color leeched from his face, then he blinked and smiled. Margaret, for a second I thought it was your mama standing there. He gave a gruff laugh. You look lovely, my dear.
Her father's praise brought tears to her eyes. His approving words came far too infrequently. Was her appearance all that mattered to him-to anyone? It seemed to be the way of the world. No one cared about who she was on the inside. No one saw the heart longing to be loved and to love in return. She sometimes even doubted God's love for her. ~ Colleen Coble

Dubbs frowns, and I expect her to keep arguing. Instead, she keeps petting the cat. ~ Caragh M. O'Brien

For me it's connection-the pleasure of an expansive, long-ranging dinner conversation with people who do all sorts of things and being able to come back to that night, night after night, and pick up threads and follow them. There's a voyeuristic pleasure, there's a synthetic pleasure, but primarily it's the pleasure of being able to live in a frame of time that the rest of life conspires to annihilate. ~ Richard Powers

Do you really think I've been murdered?" Michael's voice was soft, but I still heard it from across the bedroom. He stood in the doorway with a rather solemn expression. Words failed me. Would he really want to hear the answer? If it were me, would I want to know if someone killed me? Maybe.
I took a deep breath. "I'll be honest with you. It doesn't look good. The fact that no one knows you're dead yet makes me worry that your death might have been intentional."
I stepped closer to him, staring all the way up into his face. "But if you want the truth, I don't think the reason you died was your fault. You're a pain in the ass, but you're a good guy. I'm sorry this happened to you."
He gazed at me for a handful of seconds before nodding and his hair slid forward into his eyes. For some reason, it was the first time Michael seemed human. He was always so amiable and confident that seeing him be vulnerable felt odd.
"Thank you."
"Come on. Let's go find some answers. ~ Kyoko M.

The command of the old despotisms was "Thou shalt not". The command of the totalitarians was "Thou shalt". Our command is "Thou art". ~ George Orwell

... he wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be smothered. He wanted her to be a virgin and not a virgin all at once. He wanted to know her. Intimate secrets: Why poetry? Why so sad? Why that grayness in her eyes? Why so alone? Not lonely, just alone - riding her bike across campus or sitting off by herself in the cafeteria - even dancing, she danced alone - and it was the aloneness that filled him with love. He remembered telling her that one evening. How she nodded and looked away. And how, later, when he kissed her, she received the kiss without returning it, her eyes wide open, not afraid, not a virgin's eyes, just flat and uninvolved. ~ Tim O'Brien

What boy could resist you?"
"Will's hardly a boy."
"Don't give me that. He's a boy playing a game," Norris said. "The oldest game there is. ~ Caragh M. O'Brien

I love fiction. I like reading short stories. Cupcakes, pop songs, Polaroids, and short stories. They all raise and answer questions in a short space. I like Lorrie Moore. Amy Hempel. Tim O'Brien. Raymond Carver. All the heartbreakers. ~ Laurel Nakadate

A Catholic priest who's been sending threatening notes to Conan O'Brien was charged with stalking in the fourth degree. It just goes to show you that people can become obsessed with redheads. ~ Chelsea Handler

There seems to be an audience that demands everything be explained to them that everything be easy. And I don t think that s doing us any good as a culture. The ease with which we can accomplish or conjure any possible imaginable scenario through CGI is almost directly proportionate to how uninterested we re becoming in all of this. I can remember Ray Harryhausen s animated skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts. I can remember Willis O Brien s King Kong. I can remember being awed at the artistry that had made those things possible. Yes I knew how it was done. But it looked so wonderful. These days I can see half a million Orcs coming over a hill and I am bored. I am not impressed at all. Because frankly I could have gotten someone a passerby on the street who could have gotten the same effect if you d given them half a million dollars to do it. It removes artistry and imagination and places money in the driver s seat and I think it s a pretty straight equation - that there is an inverse relationship between money and imagination. ~ Alan Moore

The horses came thundering toward Margaret. "Get down!" Daniel tackled her to the dusty ground.
The breath puffed out of her. She struggled to free herself, but his strong body kept her pinned beneath him. She could smell the clean scent of soap underneath the scent of his skin.
Never in her life had she felt so helpless and dependent. And protected. The word whispered through her brain with a gentle allure. ~ Colleen Coble

He does kiss like a pirate though, I was able to re-affirm that. ~ Lora Leigh

Did Berg teach you?' Orson says.
'No,' I say. He never taught me anything but fear. ~ Caragh M. O'Brien

Supposedly several years ago Egyptologist Mark Lehner spent five hours in the Aswan quarry with a dolerite hammer stone pounding against the granite bedrock (copper is too soft to cut granite). He was trying to prove that the ancient tools could do the job. He managed to excavate a one-foot square hole one-inch deep for his efforts. And yet, the video that is played in a hall at the Aswan quarry site still portrays that the hewing of the stone for the unfinished and all other obelisks was done this way [...]. The experiments of Dr. Lehner reveal, there is no way that simple stone pounders could possibly have been the main tool to quarry and shape the granite obelisks. ~ Brien Foerster

I have done almost every human activity inside a taxi which does not require main drainage. ~ Alan Brien

Mental health is an important topic, and should be discussed more frequently. It's not "attention seeking. ~ Brien Blatt

Besides, what's in a name? Actually, a lot. Whether taken from a parent or grandparent, some saint, or even the late great Elvis, your name insists another person's dream of what you should have been. The portrait of some ancestral ideal lingers through heirloom names. Gender specific names imply all sorts of expectations. More than just a signifier used to summon, instruct, address, accuse, sometimes praise us, our names define and thereby limit us. They put us in a cage. ~ Brien Piechos

Did your parents have any children that weren't retarded, or were you just repeatedly dropped on your head? ~ Brien Pittman

The very worst aspect of poverty in the United States is the realization that - No one gives a shit whether you live or die.
The federal government, the state government couldn't care less. They're busy maintaining the status quo, and poverty is a big part of the economic balancing act. Hell, the economy would collapse if poverty was solved. The medical and health insurance industries; if they can't make any money off of you you're already dead to them. They couldn't care one iota if you live a life of physical pain and suffering.
And the citizens' hmmph, they're too busy stepping all over one another trying to avoid poverty.

What an insult and spit in the face of humanity to call all of this insanity civilized. ~ Brien Pittman

The majority of them give the impression of being men who have been drafted into the job during a period of martial law and are only waiting for the end of the emergency to get back to a really congenial occupation such as slum demolition or debt collecting. ~ Alan Brien

A man's character is his fate. ~ Brien Jones

When ordinary Soviet citizens are told that a vital trade agreement awarding their country most-favoured-nation status with the US is being blocked in Congress because Soviet Jews are demanding as an absolute right something few other inhabitants can expect as a special privilege - then the result is likely to be spontaneous outbreaks of anti-Semitism. ~ Alan Brien

Violence is the repartee of the illiterate ~ Alan Brien

Overthinking can lead to worrying which leads to anxiety. Anxiety can at times be crippling, leave people frozen and unable to act. Overthinking can also lead to depression. Either of these can leave you unable to focus, feeling hopeless, and irritable. ~ Brien Blatt

To say a person with a symptom is behaving in a way that is not of the ordinary implies that there is an ordinary way to behave. ~ Brien Pittman

You can never win as a sight-seer. Somebody else, more often than not the first person you meet when you get back home, has been there before you. ~ Alan Brien

The sheer size of some of the limestome foundation blocks [at Baalbek] are the largest ever quarried on the planet, conservatively estimated at 800 to 1200 tons, and the common belief that the Romans chose to do this work on such a massive scale to 'impress the locals' is absolutely ludicrous. Nowhere else in the Roman world is there any evidence of the quarrying of blocks of this size, so we can clearly presume that they were there when the Romans first appeared, and were used as foundational material. A group of three horizontally lying giant stones which form part of the podium of the Roman Jupiter Temple of Baalbek, Lebanon, go by the name 'trilithon.' Each one of these stones is 70 feet long, 14 feet high, 10 feet thick, and weighs around 800 tons. These three stone blocks are the largest building blocks ever used by any human beings anywhere in the world. The supporting stone layer beneath features a number of stones that are still in the order of 350 tons and 35 feet wide. No one knows how these blocks were moved, cut, placed, and fit perfectly together. ~ Brien Foerster

The country is laid out in a haphazard, sloppy fashion, offensive to the tidy, organized mind. ~ Alan Brien