Tea Obreht Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

When your fight has purpose - to free you from something, to interfere on the behalf of an innocent - it has a hope of finality. When the fight is about unraveling - when it is about your name, the places to which your blood is anchored, the attachment of your name to some landmark or event - there is nothing but hate, and the long, slow progression of people who feed on it and are fed it, meticulously, by the ones who come before them. Then the fight is endless, and comes in waves and waves, but always retains its capacity to surprise those who hope against it. — Tea Obreht

My grandfather would pet the dog, and, in a voice that made him sound like some kind of children's program puppet, he would say: "You're a dog! You're a dog! Where are you? You're a dog!" and the dog's tongue would drop out of its mouth and it would start keening.
After a few hours of this, I said, "Jesus Grandpa, I get it, he's a dog," not knowing that, just a few years later, I would be reminding every dog I met on the street that it was a dog, and asking it where it was. — Tea Obreht

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

In the mess of moving from place to place, I skipped two grades in the space of one year. — Tea Obreht

I've always written about animals. I'm still trying to process why that is. — Tea Obreht

Death should be celebrated ... when you put something in the ground you always know where it is — Tea Obreht

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

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

Knowing, above all, that I would come looking, and find what he had left for me, all that remained of The Jungle Book in the pocket of his doctor's coat, that folder-up, yellowed page torn from the back of the book, with a bristle of thick, coarse hairs clenced inside. Galina, says my grandfather's handwriting, above and below a child's drawing of the tiger, who is curved like the blade of a scimitar across the page. Galina, it says, and that is how I know to find him again, in Galina, in the story he hadn't told me but perhaps wished he had. — Tea Obreht

I like dark subject matter. I'm not sure what that means about me! — Tea Obreht

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

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

Eventually, my grandfather said:
- You must understand, this is one of those moments.
- What moments?
- One of those moments you keep to yourself.
... The story of this war ... that belongs to everyone ... But something like this - this is yours. It belongs only to you. And me. Only to us. — Tea Obreht

- "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

These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life. — Tea Obreht

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

Come on, is your heart a sponge or a fist? — Tea Obreht

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

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

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

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. — Tea Obreht

By the time I got to high school, I had learned to be more cautious about revealing my dreams. I was reading - and therefore writing - adventure stories. This was before I'd read Isak Dinesen and Mikhail Bulgakov, before Ernest Hemingway and T. Coraghessan Boyle, before I'd read something and really felt it, when writing was still just a compulsion, and my teen-age brain was only bordering on sentience. I filled pages of white space with swashbuckling, rapier-wielding, sidekick-sacrificing, dragon-baiting romance.
(from 'High-School Confidential' in the The New Yorker.) — Tea Obreht

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

When men die, they die in fear", he said. "They take everything they need from you, and as a doctor it is your job to give it, to comfort them, to hold their hand. But children die how they have been living - in hope. They don't know what's happening, so they expect nothing, they don't ask you to hold their hand - but you end up needing them to hold yours. With children, you're on your own. Do you understand? — Tea Obreht

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

She'll have a time with that baby and only a tiger for a husband. — Tea Obreht

My grandfather and I were very close. — Tea Obreht

Wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind. — Tea Obreht

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

Death had size an color and shape, texture and grace. There was something concrete to it. In that room, Death had come and gone, swept by, and left behind a mirage of life
it was possible, he realized, to find life in Death.
You are going to see what it is like, someday soon, being in a room full of the dying. They're always waiting, and in their sleep they are waiting most of all. When you're around them, you're waiting too, measuring all the time their breaths, their sighs. — Tea Obreht

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

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 — Tea Obreht

To me, the persistence of my grandfather's rituals meant that he was unchanged, running on discipline and continuance and stoicism. I didn't notice, and didn't realize, that the rituals themselves were changing, that there was a difference between the rituals of comfort and the preventive rituals that come at the end of life. — Tea Obreht

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

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

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

I think the mythology of death really ran away with me when I was very young. — Tea Obreht

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

I grew up in Cyprus and Egypt, these fantastic places I remember fondly. — Tea Obreht

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

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

My family lived in Egypt from 1993 to 1996. — Tea Obreht

The best fiction stays with you and changes you. — Tea Obreht

We're all entitled to our superstitions. — Tea Obreht

I am very interested in place, and the influences of place on characters. — Tea Obreht

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

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

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

But he was so young then that later he was only able to remember fragments of what happened next: the lull of the morning fields, the springy cotton flanks of the sheep, the suddenness of the tumble down the deep hole in which he would spend the night, alone, gazing up at the puzzled sheep, and hours later, Mother Vera's thoughtful, dawn-lit face hovering over the mouth of the hole. — Tea Obreht

What inspires me most to write is the act of traveling. — Tea Obreht

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

When I was eight years old, I wrote a paragraph-long short story about a goat on my mother's hundred-pound, black-and-white-screen laptop. The story came about largely because I liked the way the word 'goat' looked on the page, but I decided then and there that I wanted to be a writer. That desire never changed. — Tea Obreht

People become very upset,' Gavo tells me, 'when they find out they are going to die'
...
'They behave very strangely,' he says. 'They are suddenly filled with life. Suddenly they want to fight for things, ask questions. They want to throw hot water in your face, or beat you senseless with an umbrella, or hit you in the head with a rock. Suddenly they remember the things they have to do, people they have forgotten. — Tea Obreht

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

You must be joking," he said. "Look around. Think for a moment. It's the middle of the night, not a soul anywhere. In this city, at this time. Not a dog in the gutter. Empty. Except for this elephant - and you're going to tell your idiot friends about it? Why? Do you think they'll understand it? Do you think it will matter to them?" He — Tea Obreht

I do no writing while I'm in Belgrade visiting my grandma. — Tea Obreht

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

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

A family has its own rituals and its own superstitions. — Tea Obreht

The forty days of the soul begin on the morning after death. That first night, before its forty days begin, the soul lies still against sweated-on pillows and watches the living fold the hands and close the eyes, choke the room with smoke and silence to keep the new soul from the doors and the windows and the cracks in the floor so that it does not run out of the house like a river. The living know that, at daybreak, the soul will leave them and make its way to the places of its past ... and sometimes this journey will carry it so far for so long that it will forget to come back. — Tea Obreht