Quotes by Tea Obreht - Page 1 | QuoteForever

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My grandfather and I were very close.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Grandfather
My Grandfather
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We're all entitled to our superstitions.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Entitled
Superstitions
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Come on, is your heart a sponge or a fist?
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Fists
Heart
Sponges
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My family lived in Egypt from 1993 to 1996.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Egypt
My Family
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The best fiction stays with you and changes you.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Stays
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A family has its own rituals and its own superstitions.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Ritual
Superstitions
Rituals
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Wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Body
Bones
Heart
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What inspires me most to write is the act of traveling.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Inspire
Writing
Inspires
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I do no writing while I'm in Belgrade visiting my grandma.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Belgrade
Grandma
Visiting
Writing
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I like dark subject matter. I'm not sure what that means about me!
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Dark
Matter
Mean
Subject Matter
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I grew up in Cyprus and Egypt, these fantastic places I remember fondly.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Cyprus
Egypt
Fantastic
Remember
Fondly
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I am very interested in place, and the influences of place on characters.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Character
Influence
Influences
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I've always written about animals. I'm still trying to process why that is.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Animal
Process
Trying
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I think the mythology of death really ran away with me when I was very young.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Mythology
Ran
Thinking
Young
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In the mess of moving from place to place, I skipped two grades in the space of one year.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Grades
Mess
Moving
Two
Years
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In my earliest memory, my grandfather is bald as a stone and he takes me to see the tigers.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Grandfather
Memories
Stones
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death should be celebrated...when you put something in the ground you always know where it is
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Knows
Should
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In the end, all you want is someone to long for you when it comes time to put you in the ground.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Ends
Long
Want
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When you're in a place, the details you focus on are different than details you focus on when you're writing about it.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Details
Focus
Writing
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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.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Happens
Knows
Life Your Know
Going
Never
Life Your Never
Either
Else
Happen
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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.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Attachment
Belief
Break
Elements
Make Or Break
Reader
Realism
The End Of The Day
End Of The Day Day End
End Of The Day
Magical
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My road to publishing actually came through a colleague who connected me to my agent, and the faculty at Cornell was very supportive.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Agents
Connected
Faculty
Publishing
Supportive
Agent
Colleague
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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.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Memories
Mother
Pain
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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.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Book
Childhood
Writing
Calls
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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.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Former
Grandfather
Harder
Term
Yugoslavia
Terms
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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.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Matter
Secret
Silence
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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.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Doctors
Giving
Living Once
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In terms of people that I know, my grandmother and my mother are huge influences on my writing life because they are both massively supportive and always have been of my career.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Careers
Mother
Supportive
Writing
Life People Always
Influences
Massively
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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.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Land
Sweat
Waiting
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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.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Encouragement
Attempting
Endeavor
Inexperience
Scope
Taken
Thinking
Time Age Feel
Same Time
Seriously
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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.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Literature
The End Of The Day
Thinking
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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.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Gone
Knowing
Suffering
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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.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Block
Brain
Plot
Subject Matter
Writing
Calms
Regardless
Spanish
Translation
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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.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Black And White
Eight
Mother
Short Story
Goat
Laptop
Page
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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?
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Jobs
Men
Children
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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.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Running
Children
Lying
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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.
Tea Obreht / Novelist
Attachment
Fighting
Hate
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