Anthony Marra Quotes

#1. We imprint our intimacies upon atoms born from an explosion so great it still marks the emptiness of space. A

Anthony Marra

#2. Medical miracles are the only miracles most of us will ever see." He

Anthony Marra

#3. A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I'm transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.

Anthony Marra

#4. Those who have the bullets also have the bandages.

Anthony Marra

#5. Her father was her door to the world; he was the singular opening through which she saw, heard, and felt. Without him she didn't know what she saw, or what she heard, and what she felt; all she felt, was him gone.

Anthony Marra

#6. Nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of all things to fulfill its own.

Anthony Marra

#7. After spending the last few years working on a serious novel set in Chechnya, I was drawn to both the brevity and casualness of Twitter, and wrote a series of tweets titled 'The Erotic Inner Life of Mr. Bates from Downton Abbey.'

Anthony Marra

#8. You remember how Mom had that embroidered pillow? When she got upset, she'd shout into it and no one would hear her. That's Facebook.

Anthony Marra

#9. For months they'd run their fingers around the hem of their affection without once acknowledging the fabric.

Anthony Marra

#10. You have waited for me past the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, past each of Saturn's rings. It's ridiculous, so stupid, I know, to cross the entire solar system just to hear you and Galina butcher Tchaikovsky. If ever there was an utterance of perfection, it is this. If God has a voice, it is ours.

Anthony Marra

#11. Turning I would to I did is the grammar of growing up.

Anthony Marra

#12. You will have the last word.' 'Your name will be that word.

Anthony Marra

#13. The television dramas we grew up on, stories of star-crossed lovers, stories of love overcoming all obstacles, well, they're all fairy tales, obviously, like the television news; but the obvious is only obvious when it happens to someone else.

Anthony Marra

#14. Of course he was required to wear a seat belt, just as he was required to give directions to a torture camp, because stupidity was the single abiding law of the universe.

Anthony Marra

#15. Usually I spend a long while working alone before letting anyone read what I've written.

Anthony Marra

#16. Love, she learned, could reduce its recipient to an essential thing, as important as food or shelter, whose presence is not only longed for but needed.

Anthony Marra

#17. There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren't even a memory, you're only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.

Anthony Marra

#18. And in the middle of the lake the woman I'd spoken with floated on her back, eyes closed, as if nothing in her many years had ever gone wrong.

Anthony Marra

#19. As someone whose days were defined by the ten thousand ways a human can hurt, she needed, now and then, to remember that the nervous system didn't exist exclusively to feel pain.

Anthony Marra

#20. There are so many paths to contentment if you're open to self-delusion.

Anthony Marra

#21. The stomach is not the only vital organ that hungers.

Anthony Marra

#22. He gave the girl a blond-haired Barbie doll from lost and found ... The doll, dressed in ballroom gown and tiara, appeared surprisingly chipper given her emaciated waistline.

Anthony Marra

#23. He had learned well: made a board of the village, a pawn of the master.

Anthony Marra

#24. Work isn't meaningful just because you spend your life doing it.

Anthony Marra

#25. For their entire lives, even before they met you, your mother and father held their love for you inside their hearts like an acorn holds an oak tree.

Anthony Marra

#26. There was something about the idea of Russia that I found very intriguing, and I think I had romanticized it a lot.

Anthony Marra

#27. The previous night, for the first time in a long time, he had felt whole, and his eyes returned to the rearview, where his dignity was held within a few square centimeters of glass.

Anthony Marra

#28. Then Brezhnev grabbed the wheel of power and captained the country with the exploratory heart of a municipal bus driver.

Anthony Marra

#29. I didn't know a single person who had ever been there. I wasn't even sure how to spell Chechnya.

Anthony Marra

#30. But the terrible past of nighttime disappearances was locked within the pages of that history book; she never imagined she would one day disappear as easily as her forefathers.

Anthony Marra

#31. We know the meaning of nothing but the words we use to describe it.

Anthony Marra

#32. It's hard to think of another body of work that is more universally beloved - I don't think I've ever met someone who has encountered 'Calvin and Hobbes' without falling for them.

Anthony Marra

#33. It's stupid. There are maps to show you how to get to the place where you want to be but no maps that show you how to get to the time when you want to be.

Anthony Marra

#34. Invader and invaded held on to their fistfuls of earth, but in the end, the earth outlived the hands that held it.

Anthony Marra

#35. In my own work, humor is necessary, for the reasons stated above, but also because forbidding your characters silliness, absurdity, irony, and vulgarity forbids them aspects of the human experience every bit as universal as sorrow.

Anthony Marra

#36. The problem with rejection is that it feels imposed even when it's earned.

Anthony Marra

#37. Then tell me who Ronald McDonald is."
"Very soon I'll have to apologize for calling you an idiot again.

Anthony Marra

#38. Wealth announces itself with what's easy to break and impossible to clean. The chairs were all curvy works of art that turned sitting into yoga exercises.

Anthony Marra

#39. Even as a child she had hated children; she still did.

Anthony Marra

#40. Hipsterdom's a tightrope strung across the canyon of douche-baggery. He clung by a finger.

Anthony Marra

#41. If there is an operation, and if that operation is successful, she says she will move to Sweden. I fear for her future in a country whose citizenry is forced to assemble its own furniture.

Anthony Marra

#42. A meteorologist might beg to differ, but weather prediction was an act of infidel witchcraft that could not be trusted.

Anthony Marra

#43. Anytime I can get either of them really laughing, I immediately pull out a pad of paper write the joke down, regardless of where we are or what we're doing. I must be absolutely insufferable.

Anthony Marra

#44. The longing knotted into such a simple question was more than he could contemplate.

Anthony Marra

#45. He asked them to close their eyes, and hoped their mouths would follow suit. p. 137

Anthony Marra

#46. There were days when Earth's small glories were luminous enough to dim church icons to duller golds. Diving from the roof into fresh snow. Throwing dishes from the window after Mother's funeral. I have been blessed.

Anthony Marra

#47. You are a coward,' she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy.

Anthony Marra

#48. Our children forever changed our relationships with our mothers. Pity replaced the mild contempt with which we had previously regarded them, and we loved them as we never had before, as we could only love ourselves, because despite our best intentions we had become them.

Anthony Marra

#49. A lizard fucks a crab and nine months later a turtle pops out. It's called evolution.

Anthony Marra

#50. A mother comforts, a mother cleans. A mother gives when any reasonable person would deny. Life might affix any number of labels to Vera- Russian, pensioner, widow, daughter- but when she looked to her washed-out reflection in the bathroom mirror, she saw only Lydia's mother.

Anthony Marra

#51. As the saw teeth caught on the bone, she had performed a second surgery, one less bloody but no less brutal, excising from his heart the impulse to run, to cower, to let the man bleed to death rather than face the horror of saving him. The amputation had left both patients lighter. p 121-122

Anthony Marra

#52. We took a sledgehammer to the rules of English and reassembled the pieces into a language only we understood.

Anthony Marra

#53. Carrying that lumber the forty meters from the forest had left his knuckles blistered, his underarms sopping, but now a few hours of flames had lifted what had taken him months to design, weeks to carry, days to build, all but the nails and rivets, all but the hinges and bolts, all into the sky.

Anthony Marra

#54. When he felt like a criminal, he reminded himself that a land without law is a land without crime.

Anthony Marra

#55. No one reaches the Oval Office without a great deal of admiration for the institution - and himself - so it's unsurprising that sitting presidents favor the biographies of former presidents.

Anthony Marra

#56. He had always tried to treat Havaa as a child and she always went along with it, as though childhood and innocence were fantastical creatures that had died long ago, resurrected only in games of make believe.

Anthony Marra

#57. Her mother stared in quiet awe of this more artful rearrangement of her genetic code, and slipped into a contentedness that usually appeared only after the red wine had fallen below the bottle label.

Anthony Marra

#58. You might question a belief that so readily betrays its believers.

Anthony Marra

#59. What's his name?

Anthony Marra

#60. He was losing her incrementally. It might be a few stray hairs listless on the pillow, or the crescents of bitten fingernails tossed behind the headboard, or a dark shape dissolving in soap. As a net is no more than holes tied together, they were bonded by what was no longer there. (ARC p. 63)

Anthony Marra

#61. There's nothing quite like the sight of two dozen half-naked octogenarians. We enter the stage of life as dolls and exit as gargoyles.

Anthony Marra

#62. In the flash there's no final thought, no final reflection, just the breath carried from her body on the back of the bullet.

Anthony Marra

#63. Never forget the first three letters of confidence.

Anthony Marra

#64. I stopped by Politics & Prose to sign a few copies of 'Constellation.' A couple days later, I learned that Barack Obama also stopped by and left with one of them.

Anthony Marra

#65. On the other side of the village Havaa was studying the pale blue flowers on her mother's skirt, annoyed she couldn't find them in the Caucasian flora guide. Why invent flowers when so many real ones would be honored to find their faces on a skirt?

Anthony Marra

#66. For the first time in his life he believed without reservation in the existence of a kind and generous God, as desert thirst teaches one to believe in rain.

Anthony Marra

#67. He was losing her incrementally ... As a web is no more than holes woven together, they were bonded by what was no longer there.

Anthony Marra

#68. He spent the morning following her, nodding politely as she denounced the Russians for various earthly ills, and a few - volcanoes, winter, her arthritic hips - that fell within God's jurisdiction.

Anthony Marra

#69. She could spend the whole afternoon rebuilding it, repopulating it, until the hallucination became the more believable reality.

Anthony Marra

#70. I may be an idiot," he said gravely, "but I would never eat a hamburger cooked by a clown.

Anthony Marra

#71. ...saving a life and nurturing a life are different processes, and that to succeed in the former one must dispense with the pathos of the latter.

Anthony Marra

#72. You shouldn't rush, he said. There are no taste buds in your stomach.

Anthony Marra

#73. When I came to the last line of 'Car Crash While Hitchhiking,' I read it as a pitiless statement of indifference: a refusal to warn the family of their impending collision, a refusal to help when miraculously spared, a refusal to act on the empathy hiding behind the story's language.

Anthony Marra

#74. When I visited Chechnya, I was taken aback at first because people would regularly make jokes about kidnapping me.

Anthony Marra

#75. Some people need at least a thousand kilometers between them to stay happily married. But

Anthony Marra

#76. Kilometers above, men who didn't know her name wanted to kill her

Anthony Marra

#77. Research is not an obstacle, something to be frightened of. It can be one of the real joys of writing.

Anthony Marra

#78. This incomprehensible war would take from him even the humanity to find it incomprehensible.

Anthony Marra

#79. I have human friends, obviously. But everything's easier with a cat. He wants a little fish soup in a saucer and the occasional scratch on the head. I want the illusion that an animal bred to trade affection for food can understand the inquietudes of my soul.

Anthony Marra

#80. Her father was the face of her morning and night, he was everything, so saturating Havaa's world that she could no more describe him than she could the air.

Anthony Marra

#81. When the newborn sniffed strangely at her chest, she stared into its eyes and saw a world only two days old. Those two and a half kilograms righted her, turned her vantage to a future kinder than experience had taught her to expect.

Anthony Marra

#82. Akhmed's eight-day-old eyes had held the reflection of ten thousand possible lives. Khassan wasn't an emotive or superstitious man, and nothing like it had ever happened again, but he had found, layered in the infant's half-lidded eyes, innumerable, wanting faces, none of which he had recognized.

Anthony Marra

#83. When I pick up a book and read it, I want to be transported. I want to be taken someplace that I didn't quite know existed, so that by the time I close the book, and return to my own reality, my world is expanded and has become a little larger and a little more complicated.

Anthony Marra

#84. During the 20th century, Chechnya was written about by local poets and novelists, as well as writers from Russia and Central Asia, but very little is available in English translation.

Anthony Marra

#85. When you're writing in big block paragraphs, you can afford to have a redundant sentence now and then, but the Twitter format requires concision.

Anthony Marra

#86. There were these things and the flames ate these things, and since fire doesn't distinguish between the word of God and the word of the Soviet Communications Registry Bureau, both Qur'an and telephone directory returned to His mouth in the same inhalation of smoke.

Anthony Marra

#87. The crumbling infrastructure turned time back further than any presidential mandate.

Anthony Marra

#88. On December 9, 1994, Yeltsin issued a statement ordering the Federal army to execute the disarmament of all illegal armed units in Chechnya, or as they were known locally, the government.

Anthony Marra

#89. At Grozny TV, the line between journalism and government propaganda is traversed as often as a Manhattan crosswalk.

Anthony Marra

#90. Ever since studying in Russia as a college student, I had been in a long-distance, one-sided love affair with Chechnya's remarkable history, culture and rugged natural beauty.

Anthony Marra

#91. ...Better to armor yourself with the unreal. Better to turn inward, hide in the dark waters among the sea anemones, down deep where the sharks can't see you.

Anthony Marra

#92. With red ink, and referred to it nightly. Life: a constellation of vital phenomena - organization, irritability, movement,

Anthony Marra

#93. Happiness came in moments of unpredictable loveliness.

Anthony Marra

#94. Who wins? The Americans or the Russians?" "Both," his father said, glancing to the frost-filled windowpane. "Then who loses?" "Everyone else.

Anthony Marra

#95. She was as hard to pin down as the last pickle in the pickle jar.

Anthony Marra

#96. I wanted to be a writer, but at the time, I spent my days working a retail job, my nights sleeping in my childhood bedroom, and while I had written short stories here and there, I didn't know how to write good fiction anymore than I knew how to perform good brain surgery.

Anthony Marra

#97. Sleep just a while longer, that's it, where else can you go where you neither suffer nor cause suffering.

Anthony Marra

#98. Grozny's been largely rebuilt. But at the same time, I think the war is very much being waged inside its survivors.

Anthony Marra

#99. Despite my best efforts, word that an American tourist was in town quickly made its way around Grozny. That I had come to Chechnya not for business or NGO work, but to see the sites and meet the people, was notable enough to be broadcast throughout the republic.

Anthony Marra

#100. We twist our souls around each other's miseries.

Anthony Marra