In the mess of moving from place to place, I skipped two grades in the space of one year. Tea Obreht More Quotes by Tea Obreht More Quotes From Tea Obreht 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 living-oncedoctorsgiving 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 encouragementtakenthinking 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 yugoslaviatermgrandfather 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 careersmotherwriting 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 knowingsufferinggone 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 blockbrainwriting 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 eightblack-and-whitemother 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 childhoodwritingbook 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 detailsfocuswriting What inspires me most to write is the act of traveling. Tea Obreht writinginspire 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 facultyagentssupportive My family lived in Egypt from 1993 to 1996. Tea Obreht egyptmy-family 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 attachmenthatefighting 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 knowshappens death should be celebrated...when you put something in the ground you always know where it is Tea Obreht shouldknows 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 runninglyingchildren
