Famous Quotes & Sayings

Anthony Marra Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Anthony Marra.

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Google+ Pinterest Share on Linkedin

Famous Quotes By Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 711503

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. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 2024025

She shielded her eyes with a salute to the afternoon sun. "Right there, where the ground is blackened, just to the left of that cloud, that's where the Presidential Palace stood." Rotating in a slow circle, her index finger pressed the past into the empty panorama. The market selling Levi's two decades before any licensed clothing store. The music college, where some years earlier a prodigy had learned to play the viola by listening to the two-hundred-year history of chamber music lilting through those open windows. She reconstructed the square for Akhmed - her voice raised every edifice from the dust, replanted every linden tree - because that was easier than apology. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 1104177

They thought she knew what she was doing and she made their faith hers — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 740290

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 1860129

The crumbling infrastructure turned time back further than any presidential mandate. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 1818430

No one likes a braggart, and to praise your children is to curse them with misfortune, but we admit it, if only in secret, if only to ourselves: We are proud, we are so proud of them. We've given them all we can, but our greatest gift has been to imprint upon them our own ordinariness. They may begrudge us, may think us unambitious and narrow-minded, but someday they will realize that what makes them unremarkable is what kept them alive. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 508096

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 2140418

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 242004

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. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 874783

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 1489982

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 489934

I'm wondering when you hit the age where people say, 'Oh, OK, he's not so young.' — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 927713

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 184075

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 117775

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 672339

Never forget the first three letters of confidence. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 2069740

For the uninitiated, 'Calvin and Hobbes' is a daily comic strip detailing the antics of an unruly six-year-old and his misanthropic stuffed tiger. The boy, whose vocabulary is packed with more 10-dollar words than a GRE flashcard set, is named after John Calvin, the Reformation-era theologian who preached the doctrine of predestination. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 1882607

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 1537047

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 1039038

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 1852826

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 1917050

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 1712260

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 1132400

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 1367651

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 1410127

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 1761842

In all likelihood, Sonja had more academic journal subscriptions than friends. She could explain advanced calculus to her fifth-form algebra teacher but couldn't tell a joke to a boy at lunch. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 1434544

But Sonja was more freakish, more wondrously confounding than the one-armed guard; rather than limbs she had, somehow, amputated expectations. She didn't have a husband, or children, or a house to clean and care for. She was capable of the work, school, time, commitment, and everything else it took to run a hospital. So even if Sonja was curt and short-tempered, Havaa could forgive her these shortcomings, which were shortcomings only in that they were the opposite of what a woman was supposed to be. The thick, stern shell hid the defiance that was Sonja's life. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 1458525

At the kitchen table she examined the glass of ice. Each cube was rounded by room temperature, dissolving in its own remains, and belatedly she understood that this was how a loved one disappeared. Despite the shock wave of walking into an empty flat, the absence isn't immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the mast, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in the memory, but your fingers cannot hold it. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 1594023

You might question a belief that so readily betrays its believers. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 1475715

There was no one left to say whom you could love. p.294 — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 1706643

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 1688507

If God has a voice, it is ours. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 1655261

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 1593656

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 1305612

When he felt like a criminal, he reminded himself that a land without law is a land without crime. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 2112155

F you want to keep a man, you better hide his shoes every night so he can't walk out on you. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 2255967

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 2247573

War is unnatural, it causes people to act unnaturally. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 2244306

If ever there was a season for constipation it was winter. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 2208038

I had assumed I'd pack my bags and head elsewhere after 'Constellation,' but Chechnya is creeping its way into the margins of my second book. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 2192425

The longing knotted into such a simple question was more than he could contemplate. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 2191106

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 2187501

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 2172221

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. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 2115790

I read all of the nonfiction that I could find on Chechnya, and all the while, I was searching for a novel that was set there. I couldn't find a single novel written in English that was set in the period of the two most recent Chechen wars. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 1763945

For months they'd run their fingers around the hem of their affection without once acknowledging the fabric. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 2079722

The stomach is not the only vital organ that hungers. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 2071589

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 2070565

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 1984529

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. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 1972702

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 1959413

You mean Ronald just stepped down after ten years?' he asked. She had to be putting him on.
'He just stepped down and George Bush became president.'
'And then George Bush shot Ronald Reagan to prevent him from seizing power?'
'No,' she said. 'I think they were friends.'
'Friends?' he asked. 'It makes me wonder how we lost the Cold War.'
'Good point. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 1956838

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 1923721

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 1820286

Without electricity or gas, the kitchen became a twilight mausoleum of dead appliances. One day, Natasha had an idea. Wearing latex gloves she found in Sonja's room, she scrubbed the innards of the oven and refrigerator with steel wool and bleach. She cut a broomstick to the width of the refrigerator compartment, jammed it in below the thermostat control, and pulled out the plastic shelves. In her bedroom, she gathered clothes from the floor in sweeping armfuls and deposited them before the refrigerator and the oven. Ever since she had begun working for the shuttle trader, her wardrobe exceeded her closet space. She hung silk evening dresses and cashmere sweaters on the broomstick bar, set folded jeans and blouses on the oven rack. When finished, she opened the doors to her new closet and bureau and felt pleased with her ingenuity. This is how you will survive, she told herself. You will turn the holes in your life into storage space. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 312102

A lizard fucks a crab and nine months later a turtle pops out. It's called evolution. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 538239

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 528415

There's no working radio tower in the country. It's all static," she said, without looking to him. "I know. But 102.3 plays the best. Not too tinny. Full and robust. If a cello were to perform static, it would sound like this." She shook her head and turned the dial. "I prefer 93.9," she said. She still hadn't looked at him. "It's too thin and monotone. There's no variation. It just sounds like static." "And that's why I like it," she said. "It sounds like static is supposed to sound. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 497221

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 463796

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 444245

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 432066

We took a sledgehammer to the rules of English and reassembled the pieces into a language only we understood. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 407039

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 382202

The portrait artist must acknowledge human complexity with each brushstroke. The eyes, nose and mouth that compose a sitter's face, just like the suffering and joy that compose his soul, are similar to those of ten million others yet still singular to him. This acknowledgment is where art begins. It may also be where mercy begins. If criminals drew the faces of their victims before perpetrating their crimes and judges drew the faces of the guilty before sentencing them, then there would be no faces for executioners to draw. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 348954

You remain the hero of your own story even when you become the villain of someone else's. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 348265

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 585930

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 307418

Happiness came in moments of unpredictable loveliness. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 285406

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 284238

We should all be so lucky to get from life a sunny-day swim in chemical waste. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 221344

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 194283

They never said it, Ramzan never thanked him for it, but they both knew that the week he spent treating the infection was just that. If a stranger were to put his ear in the space between them, he would hear the dull roar of that knowledge. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 183059

Havaa, standing on a stepstool and stirring the broth, found an unfamiliar gratitude for the smallness of her life. Everywhere beyond these four walls smelled of smoke and gasoline, but here, no calamity was greater than an egg falling to the floor. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 181172

He's an excellent listener. Most cats are. Except Siameses, the chatty little bastards. I — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 180383

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 115837

Sometimes his expired faith in rational logic revives itself long enough to believe in points ... but in the end he always ends up feeling like an asshole for thinking any of the pain he either inflicts or endures has meaning beyond the senseless fact of its existence. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 93053

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 927610

Medical miracles are the only miracles most of us will ever see." He — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 1231936

Vera had held this body when it was moments old, had washed, fed, clothed it, and on her best days she couldn't look at her daughter without swelling with self-regard for having given birth to someone so worthy of love. Now that body had grown beyond the jurisdiction of her protection. Though it was rarely deployed in Vera's emotional vocabulary, she could think of no better word than wonder to describe the startling closeness of just standing here beside her child. Forget Lydia's poor choices. Forget the demons Vera could only guess at. The very fact Lydia was alive gave her mother the faith to believe she had done this one thing right. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 1190459

Usually I spend a long while working alone before letting anyone read what I've written. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 1187257

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 1174105

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 1159950

...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

Anthony Marra Quotes 77240

In the months before the repatriation her heart had hardened around her sister's absence, letting her love Natasha in memory as she could never love her in reality. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 1067069

When he reached the end, he did not die. He called your name and began to live in you. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 1041154

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 994700

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. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 962537

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 1297879

At Grozny TV, the line between journalism and government propaganda is traversed as often as a Manhattan crosswalk. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 908848

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 903277

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 827975

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 806034

Research is not an obstacle, something to be frightened of. It can be one of the real joys of writing. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 789520

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 771615

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 698726

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 641419

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

Anthony Marra Quotes 623605

This incomprehensible war would take from him even the humanity to find it incomprehensible. — Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Quotes 586663

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