…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 OBrien
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
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Virginia Woolf
I’m twenty-four, a first grade teacher, have a Yorkie named Pedro, a goldfish named Fish, have never had sex, or a serious boyfriend, and I’m the town lesbian who pukes when she sees a pussy. Nothing really to be jealous of at all.
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H.J. Bellus
Instead of finding himself in nerd heaven–where every nerd gets fifty-eight virgins to role-play with–he woke up in Robert Wood Johnson with two broken legs and a separated shoulder, feeling like, well, he'd jumped off the New Brunswick train bridge.
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Anonymous
It was masturbation, not willpower, that made it possible for gazillions of women to walk down the aisle with their reputation and their hymen still intact.
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Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The primary goal of a righteous parent who has a daughter is to minimize the number of boys and men for whom their daughter will have willingly opened her legs come her wedding day; the closer to zero, the more righteous they will seem.
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Mokokoma Mokhonoana
More Quotes By Tim OBrien
That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.
A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.
In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap...
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...
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.
