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?

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.

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.

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.

Happiness came in moments of unpredictable loveliness.

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.

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.

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)

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.

War is unnatural, it causes people to act unnaturally.

From personal experience, I completely agree that it is often easier to go for monotone sadness. When I was starting out, I wrote a gazillion short stories that ran the gamut of human suffering - drug addiction, child abuse, terminal illness, loved ones dying by all manner of misfortune, etc. In hindsight, it's clear that I mistook the power of the situation for the power of the story.

How often is immense sadness mistaken for courage?

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.

What parts had she discarded for the sake of her sanity? What had she cut from herself? Had he stared into her pupils he would have emerged, bewildered and blinking, on the far side of the earth. Was he awed by her? Absolutely. Did he respect her? Unequivocally. Want to be anything like her? No, never, not at all.

There was a time when she had indulged in the hypothetical for hours a day, plotting the map that had led her here. But no life is a line, and hers was an uneven orbit around a dark star, a moth circling a dead bulb, searching for the light it once held.

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.

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

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

We twist our souls around each other’s miseries.

Sometimes it bursts from your imagination fully formed, sometimes you absorb from nonfiction, sometimes you're able to imprint your own autobiographical experiences on a world you never yourself were a part of. A decent number of the one-liners in the title story originally came up in conversations with my girlfriend or my neighbor.

A good mixtape didn't just gather together a bunch of love songs, but instead created an emotional narrative specific to your affection. The stories in most of my favorite collections are collected more like songs on a mixtape than, say, collected like spare change. By which I mean they are in conversation with each other and work to become larger than their parts.

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.

The short story that eventually grew into Constellation was the first fiction set in Russia that I'd ever written, and that was right around the time I was giving up on a doomed, never-to-be-seen first novel. While I saw it could be something bigger, in hindsight fortuitous timing was as responsible as anything.