Tea Obreht Quotes

“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.”

“A family has its own rituals and its own superstitions.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“...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?”