Tim O'Brien Quotes

Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart.

War is the most readily available form of chaos.

We have arrived at an intellectual chaos.

Battle is an orgy of disorder.

Man's greatest fear is chaos.

I frequently hear our present period described as uncertain, confused, chaotic.

Nothing about 'Brotherhood' is ever wrapped up in a nice package.

I think frankly when it comes to chaos you ain't seen nothing yet.

Very often at the end of 'The Sopranos' you get the feeling that its not under control, you should be very worried, and life is kind of really, really messed up at lot of times. It leaves you feeling very disconcerted. That was kind of the point of it.

War is not neat. It's not tidy. It's a mess.

Chaos is what we have. That is what I believe.

Where to start? Everything cracks and shakes, The air trembles with similes, No one world's better than another; the earth moans with metaphors.

Helter skelter in a summer swelter.

Things have been a mess for so many years that trying to pin down a starting point is like trying to figure out where your skin starts.

A schizophrenic war is not an easy thing to deal with.

The confusion is not my invention. We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being aware of the confusion. It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess. It is not a mess you can make sense of.

What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it.

By day certainly the combatants have a clearer notion, though even then by no means of all that takes place, no one knowing much of anything that does not does not go on in his own immediate neighborhood; but in a night engagement ( and this was the only one that occurred between great armies during the war) how could anyone know anything for certain?

Clanless, lawless, homeless is he who is in love with civil war, that brutal ferocious thing.

When war is raging the laws are dumb.

What I hated even more than the conflict was the lurid spectacle of a world of unreason.

Let nothing be called natural In an age of bloody confusion, Ordered disorder, planned caprice, And dehumanized humanity, lest all things Be held unalterable!

Parties on the back of Parties, at war with the world and with each other.

I am waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchy

The clatter of arms drowns out the voice of law.