Top 30 Téa Obreht Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Come on, is your heart a sponge or a fist?”

— Téa Obreht

2. “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.”

— Téa Obreht

3. “Wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind.”

— Téa Obreht

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

— Téa Obreht

5. “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.”

— Téa Obreht

6. “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.”

— Téa Obreht

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

— Téa Obreht

8. “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.”

— Téa Obreht

9. “My family lived in Egypt from 1993 to 1996.”

— Téa Obreht

10. “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.”

— Téa Obreht

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

— Téa Obreht

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

— Téa Obreht

13. “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.”

— Téa Obreht

14. “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.”

— Téa Obreht

15. “We’re all entitled to our superstitions.”

— Téa Obreht

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

— Téa Obreht

17. “I think the mythology of death really ran away with me when I was very young.”

— Téa Obreht

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

— Téa Obreht

19. “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.”

— Téa Obreht

20. “I do no writing while I’m in Belgrade visiting my grandma.”

— Téa Obreht

21. “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.”

— Téa Obreht

22. “I’ve always written about animals. I’m still trying to process why that is.”

— Téa Obreht

23. “I like dark subject matter. I’m not sure what that means about me!”

— Téa Obreht

24. “My grandfather and I were very close.”

— Téa Obreht

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

— Téa Obreht

26. “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

27. “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.”

— Téa Obreht

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

— Téa Obreht

29. “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.”

— Téa Obreht

30. “The best fiction stays with you and changes you.”

— Téa Obreht

31. “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.”

— Téa Obreht

32. “When you’re in a place, the details you focus on are different than details you focus on when you’re writing about it.”

— Téa Obreht

33. “She could well remember the dread of separation twenty years ago The inevitable sense that the people you were leaving behind might never be seen again – dead, perhaps, by evening, and their loved ones on the road for days, weeks, even months, believing that life was carrying on as usual in their absence, when in fact, all that remained behind was emptiness.”

— Téa Obreht