“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, quote from The Tiger's Wife
“Come on, is your heart a sponge or a fist?”
― Téa Obreht, quote from The Tiger's Wife
“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, quote from The Tiger's Wife
“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.”
― Téa Obreht, quote from The Tiger's Wife
“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.”
― Téa Obreht, quote from The Tiger's Wife
“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, quote from The Tiger's Wife
“Wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind.”
― Téa Obreht, quote from The Tiger's Wife
“We're all entitled to our superstitions.”
― Téa Obreht, quote from The Tiger's Wife
“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, quote from The Tiger's Wife
“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, quote from The Tiger's Wife
“death should be celebrated...when you put something in the ground you always know where it is”
― Téa Obreht, quote from The Tiger's Wife
“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, quote from The Tiger's Wife
“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, quote from The Tiger's Wife
“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.”
― Téa Obreht, quote from The Tiger's Wife
“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, quote from The Tiger's Wife
“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, quote from The Tiger's Wife
“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.”
― Téa Obreht, quote from The Tiger's Wife
“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, quote from The Tiger's Wife
“In my earliest memory, my grandfather is bald as a stone and he takes me to see the tigers.”
― Téa Obreht, quote from The Tiger's Wife
“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, quote from The Tiger's Wife
“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, quote from The Tiger's Wife
“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, quote from The Tiger's Wife
“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, quote from The Tiger's Wife
“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, quote from The Tiger's Wife
“These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life.”
― Téa Obreht, quote from The Tiger's Wife
“She'll have a time with that baby and only a tiger for a husband.”
― Téa Obreht, quote from The Tiger's Wife
“The forty days of the soul begin on the morning after death. That first night, before its forty days begin, the soul lies still against sweated-on pillows and watches the living fold the hands and close the eyes, choke the room with smoke and silence to keep the new soul from the doors and the windows and the cracks in the floor so that it does not run out of the house like a river. The living know that, at daybreak, the soul will leave them and make its way to the places of its past...and sometimes this journey will carry it so far for so long that it will forget to come back.”
― Téa Obreht, quote from The Tiger's Wife
Téa Obreht
Born place: in Belgrade, Serbia
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“People didn't like having to come up with something smart or helpful or sensitive to say, and they weren't intelligent enough to realize that all we wanted, all I wanted, was to be treated the same as I had been three months before. I wanted to be ignored because of my eccentricities, not because of my brother. And I wanted to be offered help from people because they cared about me, not because they felt some strange social obligation to do so. I wanted the world to sit back, listen up, and let me explain to it that when someone is sad and hopeless, the last thing they need to feel is that they are the only ones in the world with that feeling. So, if you feel sorry for someone, don't pretend to be happy. Don't pretend to care only about their problems. People aren't stupid. Not all of us, anyway. If someone's little brother disappears, don't give him a free hamburger to make him feel better-- it doesn't work. It's a good burger, sure, but it means nothing. It means something only to the Mr. Burkes of the world. Offering free meals, free stays in condos in Florida, even free plumbing. And we let them. We let them because they need it, not us. We didn't let them help us because we needed it, we let them help us because inside of humans is this thing, this unnamed need to feel as if we were useful in the world. To feel as if we have something significant to contribute. So, old ladies, make your casseroles and set them on doorsteps. And old men, grill your burgers and give them to teenagers with cynical worldviews. The world can't be satisfied, but that need to fix it all can.”
― John Corey Whaley, quote from Where Things Come Back
“Welcome to Dauntless! Where you either face your fears and try not to die in the process or you leave a coward”
― Veronica Roth, quote from The Transfer
“If you can't be happy where you are, you can't be happy anywhere”
― Neil Gaiman, quote from The Sandman: Endless Nights
“Milton's Eve! Milton's Eve! ... Milton tried to see the first woman; but Cary, he saw her not ... I would beg to remind him that the first men of the earth were Titans, and that Eve was their mother: from her sprang Saturn, Hyperion, Oceanus; she bore Prometheus" --
"Pagan that you are! what does that signify?"
"I say, there were giants on the earth in those days: giants that strove to scale heaven. The first woman's breast that heaved with life on this world yielded the daring which could contend with Omnipotence: the stregth which could bear a thousand years of bondage, -- the vitality which could feed that vulture death through uncounted ages, -- the unexhausted life and uncorrupted excellence, sisters to immortality, which after millenniums of crimes, struggles, and woes, could conceive and bring forth a Messiah. The first woman was heaven-born: vast was the heart whence gushed the well-spring of the blood of nations; and grand the undegenerate head where rested the consort-crown of creation. ...
I saw -- I now see -- a woman-Titan: her robe of blue air spreads to the outskirts of the heath, where yonder flock is grazing; a veil white as an avalanche sweeps from hear head to her feet, and arabesques of lighting flame on its borders. Under her breast I see her zone, purple like that horizon: through its blush shines the star of evening. Her steady eyes I cannot picture; they are clear -- they are deep as lakes -- they are lifted and full of worship -- they tremble with the softness of love and the lustre of prayer. Her forehead has the expanse of a cloud, and is paler than the early moon, risen long before dark gathers: she reclines her bosom on the ridge of Stilbro' Moor; her mighty hands are joined beneath it. So kneeling, face to face she speaks with God. That Eve is Jehova's daughter, as Adam was His son.”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Shirley
“If it winds up earlier, you should have a movie picked out. This is assuming she isn’t sending you the ‘let’s go back to my place’ signals. In that case—”
“Don’t go there, Bob. Let’s just not go there.”
― Nora Roberts, quote from Vision in White
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