Tea Obreht Quotes

#1. She'll have a time with that baby and only a tiger for a husband.

Tea Obreht

#2. I am very interested in place, and the influences of place on characters.

Tea Obreht

#3. I do no writing while I'm in Belgrade visiting my grandma.

Tea Obreht

#4. Suddenness," he says. " You do not prepare, you do not explain, you do not apologize. Suddenly, you go. And with you, you take all contemplation, all consideration of your own departure. All the suffering that would have come from knowing comes after you are gone, and you are not a part of it.

Tea Obreht

#5. Wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind.

Tea Obreht

#6. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life.

Tea Obreht

#7. Kelly Link's prose is conveyed in details so startling and fine that you work up a sweat just waiting for the next sentence to land. This is why we read, crave, need, can't live without short stories.

Tea Obreht

#8. It's a sad thing to see, because as far as I know, this man Gavo had done nothing to deserve being shot in the back of the head at his own funeral. Twice.

Tea Obreht

#9. But children die how they have been living-with hope. They don't what is happening, so they expect nothing, they don't ask you to hold their hand-but you end up needing them to hold yours.

Tea Obreht

#10. In terms of people that I know, my grandmother and my mother are huge influences on my writing life because they are both massively supportive and always have been of my career.

Tea Obreht

#11. A lot of writers that I know have told me that the first book you write, you write about your childhood, whether you want to or not. It calls you back.

Tea Obreht

#12. And several bystanders - the innkeeper, assorted security personnel, probably a nurse or two, all terrified into competency by my grandfather's rage - stood

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#13. In the end, all you want is someone to long for you when it comes time to put you in the ground.

Tea Obreht

#14. I think the mythology of death really ran away with me when I was very young.

Tea Obreht

#15. No matter how grave the secret, how imperative absolute silence, someone would always feel the urge to confess, and an unleashed secret is a terrible force.

Tea Obreht

#16. It is as if, having stepped into a room, a man can no longer see the door through which he has come, and so cannot leave.

Tea Obreht

#17. The dead are celebrated. The dead are loved. They give something to the living. Once you put something into the ground, Doctor, you always know where to find it.

Tea Obreht

#18. The best fiction stays with you and changes you.

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#19. At the end of the day, despite all the other great things that literature does in society and in a person's life, I think that we read to escape. And I think that place, more than anything, provides that escape quickly, if an author is engaged with the place.

Tea Obreht

#20. Everything lies dead in his memory, except for the tiger's wife, for whom, on certain nights, he goes calling, making that tight note that falls and falls. The sound is lonely, and low, and no one hears it anymore.

Tea Obreht

#21. Anyway,' he said, without hearing me, 'that whole week he was gone, Bis sat next to the dumpster and didn't move, and we all thought he was waiting by the road for Arlo to come back. Except we had it wrong- he was waiting for us to find Arlo.

Tea Obreht

#22. At the end of the day, it's about the reader's attachment to and belief in the magical elements that make or break magical realism.

Tea Obreht

#23. I like dark subject matter. I'm not sure what that means about me!

Tea Obreht

#24. We were seventeen, furious at everything because we didn't know what else to do with the fact that the war was over.

Tea Obreht

#25. We're all entitled to our superstitions.

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#26. Years of fighting, andm before that, a lifetime on the cusp of it. Conflict we didn't understand ... had been at the center of everything.

Tea Obreht

#27. Grandfather recently died. He died alone on a trip away from home in a town where no one expected him to be

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#28. My grandfather and I were very close.

Tea Obreht

#29. I felt my voice had fallen through and through me, and I couldn't summon it back to tell him or myself anything at all.

Tea Obreht

#30. My mother always says that fear and pain are immediate, and that, when they're gone we're left with the concept, but not the true memory.

Tea Obreht

#31. Death should be celebrated ... when you put something in the ground you always know where it is

Tea Obreht

#32. Come on, is your heart a sponge or a fist?

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#33. A family has its own rituals and its own superstitions.

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#34. When you're in a place, the details you focus on are different than details you focus on when you're writing about it.

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#35. In the mess of moving from place to place, I skipped two grades in the space of one year.

Tea Obreht

#36. I started to feel that nagging sense of shame again, an acute awareness of my own inability to share in his [my grandfather's] optimism.

Tea Obreht

#37. The fact that you are in a hurry is of no particular interest to them; in their opinion, if you are making your journey in a hurry, you are making it poorly.

Tea Obreht

#38. I've always written about animals. I'm still trying to process why that is.

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#39. Believe me, Doctor, if your life ends in suddenness you will be glad it did, and if it does not you will wish it had. You will want suddenness, Doctor.

Tea Obreht

#40. My road to publishing actually came through a colleague who connected me to my agent, and the faculty at Cornell was very supportive.

Tea Obreht

#41. The distance of the fighting created the illusion of normalcy, but the new rules resulted in an attitude shift that did not suit the Administration's plans. They were going for structure, control, for panic that produced submission - what

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#42. My family lived in Egypt from 1993 to 1996.

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#43. Zora was a woman of principle, an open atheist. At the age of thirteen, a priest had told her that animals had no souls, and she had said, "well then, fuck you, Pops," and walked out of church.

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#44. In my earliest memory, my grandfather is bald as a stone and he takes me to see the tigers.

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#45. Fear and pain are immediate, and that, when they're gone, we're left with the concept, but not the true memory
why else ... would anyone give birth more than once?

Tea Obreht

#46. For me it was a lot harder to come to terms with the death of my grandfather than it was to come to terms with what's happened to the former Yugoslavia.

Tea Obreht

#47. - "I once knew a girl who loved tigers so much she almost became one herself." Because I am little, and my love of tigers comes directly from him, I believe he is talking about me, offering me a fairy tale in which I can imagine myself - and will, for years and years.

Tea Obreht

#48. Being taken seriously, for a young writer, is a wonderful form of encouragement, but at the same time, I don't think one should ever feel like attempting a kind of artistic endeavor is beyond your scope just because of age or inexperience.

Tea Obreht

#49. I grew up in Cyprus and Egypt, these fantastic places I remember fondly.

Tea Obreht

#50. What inspires me most to write is the act of traveling.

Tea Obreht

#51. When I hit a block, regardless of what I am writing, what the subject matter is, or what's going on in the plot, I go back and I read Pablo Neruda's poetry. I don't actually speak Spanish, so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I don't know why, but it calms me, calms my brain.

Tea Obreht