Anthony Marra, A Constellation Of Vital Phenomena Quotes

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

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.

She wouldn't climb out of the bed for her sister, but she had climbed into a crater. She wouldn't cross a room, but she had crossed a continent.

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.

She knew better than to challenge a man who spent his life preparing for the apocalypse.

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

He had memorized the entire Qur'an and lectured on the nature of evil, which, like a shadow, cannot exist independently of the good silhouettes.

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.

... hurt burrowed deeper than anything she'd ever felt, deep enough to change from the thing she felt to the thing she was.

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.

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

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

But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.

Time became more important the closer to death one was, so an extra few hours to make peace with the world were worth more than years.

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.

She felt as buoyantly patriotic as her Chechen classmates who could trace their family trees back to the acorns

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

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