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Téa Obreht QUOTES

Téa Obreht QUOTES

21 " 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. "

― Téa Obreht , The Tiger's Wife

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

― Téa Obreht , The Tiger's Wife

23 " We're all entitled to our superstitions. "

― Téa Obreht , The Tiger's Wife

24 " 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. "

― Téa Obreht , The Tiger's Wife

25 " 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. "

― Téa Obreht , The Tiger's Wife

26 " 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. "

― Téa Obreht , The Tiger's Wife

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

― Téa Obreht , The Tiger's Wife

28 " 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. "

― Téa Obreht , The Tiger's Wife

29 " The longer I live, Burke, the more I have come to understand that extraordinary people are eroded by their worries while the useless are carried ever forward by their delusions. "

― Téa Obreht , Inland

30 " 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."

I wan to say to him, the living are celebrated too, and loved. But this has gone on long enough, and he seems to think so too. "

― Téa Obreht , The Tiger's Wife

31 " 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. "

― Téa Obreht , The Tiger's Wife

32 " 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. "

― Téa Obreht , The Tiger's Wife

33 " 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. "

― Téa Obreht , The Tiger's Wife

34 " 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. "

― Téa Obreht , The Tiger's Wife

35 " 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. "

― Téa Obreht , The Tiger's Wife

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

― Téa Obreht , The Tiger's Wife

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

― Téa Obreht , The Tiger's Wife

38 " 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. "

― Téa Obreht , The Tiger's Wife

39 " 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.) "

― Téa Obreht

40 " 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—why else, she reasons, would anyone give birth more than once? "

― Téa Obreht , The Tiger's Wife