Tea Obreht Quotes

'M Train' is as close to knowing what I'm like as anything. I don't know exactly what the book is about. All and nothing, I suppose.

Since I was a kid, I've had this morbid fascination with dark and scary subject matter.

I've always been just kind of consumed by my own thoughts.

A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.

What's in your soul is in your soul.

I don't really look at myself as the kind of person who craves attention, but I've never been to therapy so there's probably a lot of stuff about myself that I don't know.

If I was writing songs just for me I'd only play them in my living room, alone.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy... and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

I try to write about internal experience versus the external self. I like to present ideas, but not package them neatly.

It's interesting if you can talk about the large moments and also the small moments to understand the deepest complexities of a man by trying to imagine who they are.

Madame Bovary is myself.

I've always been attracted to darkness.

It would be curious to discover who it is to whom one writes in a diary. Possibly to some mysterious personification of one's own identity.

The study of the human character opens at once a beautiful and a deformed picture of the soul.

People sometimes seem surprised because often, you know, you know, there's a lot of tortured characters in the stuff I write.

I look in the mirror, and what I see is someone who has never grown up - a crashing sentimentalist who alternates between great heights and black depths.

I'm a deep person. I'm not a superficial person at all.

I'm not in the habit of going to a psychologist. I psychologize myself.

I think of the part of me that writes as the most private self. It's the part that's engaged the least with the rest of the world's needs.

Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait.

With tremendous clarity and wisdom, Daniel Tomasulo has crafted a memoir at once heartbreaking and uplifting. Layers of time and memory—childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, middle age—are so beautifully revealed here, a trenchant reminder that our pasts are alive inside of us. There are psychologists who can write, and writers who can psychologize, but rarely have the two met on the page with such moving, profound results.

I was constantly watching myself, my secret self, as dependent on my actions as my own personality

You must reach inside yourselves where I live like a story, not old, not young laughing at my own sorrow, weeping pearls at weddings, wielding a torch to melt sand into something clear and bright.

Writing mirrors the interior self. You know, any book is like the perfect blueprint of the psyche of the author.

We use books like mirrors, gazing into them only to discover ourselves.