I’m not interested in blind optimism, but I’m very interested in optimism that is hard-won, that takes on darkness and then says, ‘This is not enough.’ But it takes time, more time than we can sometimes imagine, to get there. And sometimes we don’t.

There are rocks deep enough in this earth that no matter what the rupture, they will never see the surface. There is, I think, a fear of love. There is a fear of love.

So much of her time spent like this: dreaming up things to say and never quite saying them.

People are good or half good or a quarter good, and it changes all the time- but even on the best day nobody's perfect.

Téa Obreht is the most thrilling literary discovery in years

...it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.

We have to listen to other people's stories. That's the thing. And that's the only way that we eventually get to know ourselves.