The Tiger's Wife Quotes

“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, The Tiger's Wife

“Come on, is your heart a sponge or a fist?”
― Tea Obreht, The Tiger's Wife

“In the end, all you want is someone to long for you when it comes time to put you in the ground.”
― Tea Obreht, 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, 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, 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, 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, The Tiger's Wife

“Wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind.”
― Tea Obreht, The Tiger's Wife

“We're all entitled to our superstitions.”
― Téa Obreht, 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, The Tiger's Wife

“Believe me, Doctor, if your life ends in suddenness you will be glad it did, and if it does not you will wish it had. You will want suddenness, Doctor.”
― Téa Obreht, 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, The Tiger's Wife

“People become very upset,' Gavo tells me, 'when they find out they are going to die'
. . .
'They behave very strangely,' he says. 'They are suddenly filled with life. Suddenly they want to fight for things, ask questions. They want to throw hot water in your face, or beat you senseless with an umbrella, or hit you in the head with a rock. Suddenly they remember the things they have to do, people they have forgotten.”
― Téa Obreht, 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, 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, The Tiger's Wife

“death should be celebrated...when you put something in the ground you always know where it is”
― Téa Obreht, 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, 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, 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, The Tiger's Wife

“- "I once knew a girl who loved tigers so much she almost became one herself.” Because I am little, and my love of tigers comes directly from him, I believe he is talking about me, offering me a fairy tale in which I can imagine myself—and will, for years and years.”
― Téa Obreht, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, The Tiger's Wife

“My grandfather would pet the dog, and, in a voice that made him sound like some kind of children's program puppet, he would say: "You're a dog! You're a dog! Where are you? You're a dog!" and the dog's tongue would drop out of its mouth and it would start keening.
After a few hours of this, I said, "Jesus Grandpa, I get it, he's a dog," not knowing that, just a few years later, I would be reminding every dog I met on the street that it was a dog, and asking it where it was.”
― Téa Obreht, 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, The Tiger's Wife

“These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life.”
― Téa Obreht, 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—why else, she reasons, would anyone give birth more than once?”
― Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife