Tea Obreht Quotes

Come on, is your heart a sponge or a fist?

You never know what's going to happen in your life, and you never know what's going to happen in someone else's life either.

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.

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.

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.

The best fiction stays with you and changes you.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

A family has its own rituals and its own superstitions.

We're all entitled to our superstitions.

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.

My grandfather and I were very close.

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

Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life – of my grandfather’s days in the army; his great love for my grandmother; the years he spent as a surgeon and a tyrant of the University. One, which I learned after his death, is the story of how my grandfather became a man; the other, which he told to me, is of how he became a child again.

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.

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

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

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

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

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