Tea Obreht Quotes

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

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

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

A family has its own rituals and its own superstitions.

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

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.

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

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

The best fiction stays with you and changes you.

We're all entitled to our superstitions.

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

My family lived in Egypt from 1993 to 1996.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

My grandfather and I were very close.

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

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.

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

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

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

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