Inland Quotes

“The longer I live, Burke, the more I have come to understand that extraordinary people are eroded by their worries while the useless are carried ever forward by their delusions.”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“...the older she grew the more she came to recognize falsehood as the preservative that allowed the world to maintain its shape.”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“But we remembered, you and I. It saddened me. Who would speak of these things when we were gone? So, too, must the makers of those distant fires have asked themselves as they fought the fading of their world. I began to wish that I could pour our memories into the water we carried, so that anyone drinking might see how it had been.”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“Life's happiness is always a famine, and what little we find interests nobody. What use is it, the happiness of some stranger? At worst, it drives onlookers to envy; at best, it bores them.”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“But ain’t that how we learn to be ourselves? Failing to impress them that matter most to us?”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“Might the dead truly inhabit the world alongside the living: laughing, thriving, growing, and occupying themselves with the myriad mundanities of afterlife, invisible merely because the mechanism of seeing them had yet to be invented?”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“Time doesn’t change, Nor do times. Only things inside time change, Things you will believe, and things you won’t. —JAMES GALVIN, “Belief”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“Today's conveniences were yesterday's magic.”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“There are wounds of time and there are wounds of person, Misafir. Sometimes people come through their wounds, but time does not. Sometimes it's the other way around. Sometimes the wounds are so grievous, there's no coming through them at all.”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“The longer I live, Burke, the more I have come to understand that extraordinary people are eroded by their worries while the useless are carried ever forward by their delusions”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“Lying was as easy as saying nothing.”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“this must be the crux of life: everybody blundering around in the full glare of ruination.”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“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.”
― Tea Obreht, Inland

“Two breads, left to rise overnight, had burst out of their pans like dancehall girls leaning over the rail. The sight of them sent a bolt of panic through Nora. She had mixed them last night in the grip of optimism, still listening for Emmett's wheels on the drive -- still counting on all the things water would allow, a long drink and laundry, perhaps even a bath -- and now here they sat: two bloated mistakes that had brought the entire household not one, but two, cups closer to the bottom of the bucket.”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“It was a lot of gilded talk, Burke, and I was suspicious of it. Not because I didn't want to see—but because that look in Jolly's eyes, the way he got when people spoke of mineral as though it were the face of the Lord, well it struck me wrong. But then I got to thinking—don't we all got a thing makes us get that look in our eyes? All of us who ever said, let's go, let's go on, who starved for the sight of something new? Perhaps it ain't the same.”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“And ain't that the point of life, after all? To feel yourself living it?”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“He was a writer who'd come to the West to make something of its stories. He asked me what I had learned of it all, and I told him I did not know—which struck him as a great profundity. Everyone he'd met had just about one thing to say: the land was changing fast. I supposed it was, but what struck me the most was how much of it was staying the same. Lean holdings, miles that couldn't be made unwild. That vast and immutable want everybody, dead or live, carried with them all the time.”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“...passersby shouting, “hey is this the place?”; yes, this is the place; this is the place—until it isn’t; her house—until it isn’t; no water and therefore no house, no paper, no town at all, one way or the other, no matter what; but then some other town, some other house, some house elsewhere...
...on their porch; on the porch of
some new house, theirs but not this, not this one at all; not this sun-drowned farm with its camel and rider sleeping side by side together beneath the roasted earth; not this house, with its puncheon log where the words were written, where they had lived once, and yes, been happy—she saw everything, she saw it all.”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“An old and sudden sorrow joined her instead. She felt it arrive as though some distant friend, long unseen, were calling from just outside the house, and she need only go toward that familiar voice and open the door.”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“But every day we go on is home.”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“Don’t despair, Misafir,” she said. “So go the ravages of time.”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“How strange to know it so suddenly. Perhaps at one time there had been opportunity to learn it, grow used to it, but that was all past now. She felt as though she’d stepped into a field camp only to find it deserted and realize that all the people she had been expecting to see there had already moved on.”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“I’ve the strangest feeling,” she said.

“Fitting enough for strange times.”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“And where was I? Dreaming about it in a moonlit wood.”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“You had belonged to no one, not even me - unless it was the belonging friends make of each other, scarcely existing without traces of themselves in each other’s memories.”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“longer I live, Burke, the more I have come to understand that extraordinary people are eroded by their worries while the useless are carried ever forward by their delusions.”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“Beyond town lay the twin cables of the railway, and the plains, gray and snow-dregged in winter, yellow every other season, scattershot with distant, unseen forts. You could stand anywhere and look off in any direction and feel you were nowhere, and yet somehow perfectly bounded, perfectly surrounded. That was Cheyenne: nowhere, wanting nothing more than to be exactly what it was.”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“They lived by their own unflinching laws, often subduing mistake by their mere presence.”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“A punch had shoved the balance of his front teeth straight back in their gums. He stood, in nothing but muddy trousers and a bib of his own dried blood, calling for a spoon. Moss Riley had obliged him with one. Harlan, in full view of everybody, had put it to the backs of his teeth and pushed them forward into place with a crack that called to mind a felled tree and momentarily cost at least one observer his consciousness.”
― Téa Obreht, Inland

“You had belonged to no one, not even me—unless it was the belonging friends make of each other,
scarcely existing without traces of themselves in each other’s memories.”
― Téa Obreht, Inland