Quotes About Marra

#1. If God has a voice, it is ours.

Anthony Marra

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

Anthony Marra

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

Anthony Marra

#4. 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

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

Anthony Marra

#6. 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

#7. My work often begins as little internal dares, wondering if I can pull something off. So I spent a few years drawing these stories together, trying to build a Pangea of what began as separate continents.

Anthony Marra

#8. Everything large enough to love eventually disappoints you, then betrays you, and finally, forgets you. But the things small enough to fit into a shoebox, these stay as they were.

Anthony Marra

#9. 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

#10. This should be a librarian's job, of course, but you can't trust people who read that much.

Anthony Marra

#11. No one can take what's inside your head once it's there.

Anthony Marra

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

Anthony Marra

#13. 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

#14. She stood back and wiped the sweat-sting from her eyes. The air was clean. Her hands brown with dirt. Pride surged through her, raw and immense; she had believed happiness to be an absence - of fear, of pain, of grief - but here it roared in her as powerful as any sadness.

Anthony Marra

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

Anthony Marra

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

Anthony Marra

#17. 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

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

Anthony Marra

#19. 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

#20. A mind to feeble to tell the time of day can still get the right blood to the right places, he thought.

Anthony Marra

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

Anthony Marra

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

Anthony Marra

#23. 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

#24. [T]o some people ignorance is a sleeping mask they mistake for corrective lenses.

Anthony Marra

#25. The future is the lie with which we justify the brutality of the present.

Anthony Marra

#26. 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

#27. Maybe we try to find them in other people. In kindness and generosity; those things don't disappear.

Anthony Marra

#28. 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

#29. Even after Sonja graduated secondary school at the top of her class and matriculated to the city university biology department, their parents found more to love in Natasha. Sonja's gifts were too complex to be understood, and therefore less desirable.

Anthony Marra

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

Anthony Marra

#31. Grammar was the only place the girl could keep her father alive.

Anthony Marra

#32. We wear clothes, and speak, and create civilizations, and believe we are more than wolves. But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.

Anthony Marra

#33. 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

#34. In order to become the chisel that breaks the marble inside us, the artist must first become the hammer. [Soviet censor of paintings and photos]

Anthony Marra

#35. Too young to explain in words, the girl's face was old enough to show the loss that was that name.

Anthony Marra

#36. I quickly realized I live the least interesting literary life imaginable. My parents are happily married. There haven't been any major traumas. I'm not sure that the story of my life would be much fun to read.

Anthony Marra

#37. By that point a career change was beyond consideration; he was a bottle, thrown to the sea, into which the villagers had folded their wishes, and though he was willing to give up on himself, he wasn't willing to let down those who believed he could carry them over the water.

Anthony Marra

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

Anthony Marra

#39. Endurance, I reminded myself, is the true measure of existence.

Anthony Marra

#40. The botanist was a decent man, but Khassan was in love, and thus capable of infinite hate.

Anthony Marra

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

Anthony Marra

#42. She was fluent in four languages and yet her fists against the rusted hood were the fullest articulation of her defeat.

Anthony Marra

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

Anthony Marra

#44. 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

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

Anthony Marra

#46. 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

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

Anthony Marra

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

Anthony Marra

#49. 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

#50. When confronted with the facts of foreign atrocities, the experience is often consigned to the realm of the unimaginable. Fiction makes the unimaginable imaginable.

Anthony Marra

#51. 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

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

Anthony Marra

#53. Entire years had passed when he was rich enough in time to disregard the loose change of a minute, but now he obsessed over each one, this minute, the next minute, the one following, all of which were different terms for the same illusion.

Anthony Marra

#54. 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

#55. The interrogation has succeeded; I am now an enemy of the state. ... I have become a violent act of reality inflicted upon the fiction of which we are both citizens. I want him to know that I understand this, that every thump of his truncheon hardens my resolve, that he has my permission.

Anthony Marra

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

Anthony Marra

#57. I'm overcome by the inexplicable desire to speak to you with common courtesy.

Anthony Marra

#58. To make a book convincing, it's less important that the right tree be in the right place than that the characters are emotionally real.

Anthony Marra

#59. This changed when Khassan joined them, once every few months, as the invisible structure built between them failed to support the weight of another man. p 140

Anthony Marra

#60. While looking up news from the North Caucasus on Twitter, I was linked to the sanguinely titled 'Seven Wonders of Chechnya Tour' on the website of Chechnya Travel, the postwar republic's first tourism outfit, founded in 2012.

Anthony Marra

#61. After crossing herself, she lay back on the divan and squirted a cool puddle of hand lotion from the bottle she'd brought from London. Invariably she would apply too much, and her hands would be slick and shiny in the candlelight as she asked for another pair with which to share the excess.

Anthony Marra

#62. I've always though Marx's view on religion was the one thing he got right. Faith is a crutch.'
'If you step on a land mine,' Akhmed said, the crutch becomes the leg.

Anthony Marra

#63. If you work hard, and give up certain things, and yes, resort to bribery now and then, you'll be an arborist, or a sea anemonist, or anything else you want.

Anthony Marra

#64. A single whisper can be quite a disturbance when the rest of the audience is silent.

Anthony Marra

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. Life: a constellation of vital phenomena - organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.

Anthony Marra

#68. 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

#69. Bill Watterson argued with his medium even as he eclipsed it. He was all too aware that no artistic expression better exemplifies our disposable consumer culture than the daily newspaper comic strip: today's masterpiece is tomorrow's birdcage lining.

Anthony Marra

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

Anthony Marra

#71. 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

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

Anthony Marra

#73. But there had to be a quota. An upper limit to the number of miracles one is privileged to in a lifetime. How many times can a beloved reappear?

Anthony Marra

#74. For the years I spent working on it, 'Constellation' was the only novel I knew how to write, so maybe I still abided by the maxim? Regardless, I prefer the maxim: Write what you want to know, rather than what you already know.

Anthony Marra

#75. God had pulled her through a needle's eye so narrow that this thread in front of them was all that remained.

Anthony Marra

#76. Don't insult me. Everyone knows a turtle is a crustacean on its mother's side.

Anthony Marra

#77. You can tell by the way I use my walk, I'm a woman's man,'Laina said, ...
'You know that song?'
'Of course. People used to recite it in the war. I didn't know it was a song. For the longest time I thought it was from the Qur'an.

Anthony Marra

#78. I joined a writing class at a nearby community center, where I was the youngest participant by about 40 years. Once a week, I'd funnel down a staircase and join the dozen retirees crowded in folding chairs around a table to discuss one another's stories.

Anthony Marra

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

Anthony Marra

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

Anthony Marra

#81. After working fourteen-hour shifts in the mines, inhaling so much nickel they sneezed silver glitter, none could have expected a private performance from the prima ballerina of the Kirov.

Anthony Marra

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.

Anthony Marra

#86. You look at a surgeon as you would a secular priest, almost, if it's your child, if it's your sister on the operating table. That was an idea that very much has interested me and I've wanted to explore for some time.

Anthony Marra

#87. Natasha tried to wedge herself into the conversation, but as usual the triangle would not widen into a square. p.302

Anthony Marra

#88. I took a 19th-century Russian novel class in college and have been smitten with Russian literature ever since. Writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Grossman, and Solzhenitsyn tackle the great questions of morality, politics, love, and death.

Anthony Marra

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

Anthony Marra

#90. 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

#91. That can cause an electrolyte disturbance: hypercalcemia. Stones, bones, moans, groans, thrones, and psychiatric overtones. That's the mnemonic, Natasha said, and repeated psychiatric overtones to herself. p.307

Anthony Marra

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

Anthony Marra

#93. I never imagined that something as solemn and final as death could be this idiotic. It was the keyhole through which I first glimpsed life's madness: the
institutions we believe in will pervert us, our loved ones will fail us, and death is a falling piano.

Anthony Marra

#94. There was no one left to say whom you could love. p.294

Anthony Marra

#95. The idea that fiction can capture the stories that fall through the cracks of history informed 'A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,' which progresses across the two Chechen Wars of the 1990s and early 2000s.

Anthony Marra

#96. 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

#97. He's an excellent listener. Most cats are. Except Siameses, the chatty little bastards. I

Anthony Marra

#98. 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

#99. How often is immense sadness mistaken for courage?

Anthony Marra

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

Anthony Marra