Anthony Marra Quotes

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

Inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce, and that is who we are.

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?

Perhaps our deepest love is already inscribed within us, so its object doesn't create a new word but instead allows us to read the one written.

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.

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.

Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.

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.

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.

Happiness came in moments of unpredictable loveliness.

How often is immense sadness mistaken for courage?

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.

You are mine. I recognize you. We twist our souls around each other's miseries. It is that which makes us family.

War is unnatural, it causes people to act unnaturally.

We twist our souls around each other’s miseries.

We tend to associate humor with lightheartedness, but really, it's a rhetorical mode than can be applied to any subject. It was through researching Chechnya that I came to understand this.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The stomach is not the only vital organ that hungers.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Never forget the first three letters of confidence.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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]

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

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