Tea Obreht Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

When you're in a place, the details you focus on are different than details you focus on when you're writing about 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?

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

My family lived in Egypt from 1993 to 1996.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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

The best fiction stays with you and changes you.

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

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.

Lying was as easy as saying nothing.

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.

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.

A family has its own rituals and its own superstitions.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.