Anthony Marra quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Anthony Marra on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

What divine imagination could conjure something so imperfect as life?

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

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

She could spend the whole afternoon rebuilding it, repopulating it, until the hallucination became the more believable reality.

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

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.

If God has a voice, it is ours.

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

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

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

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

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

Those who have the bullets also have the bandages.

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

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

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.

I'm a little disappointed. You spent five years in London and all I get is a doll?" "The real gift was my absence." Finally, a smile.

Some people need at least a thousand kilometers between them to stay happily married. But

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

The stomach is not the only vital organ that hungers.

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.

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

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

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.

Turning I would into I did is the grammar of growing up.

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

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.

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

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

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

Pulling back a stray lock of hair, she drew a question mark around her ear. p. 314

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.

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

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.

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

With red ink, and referred to it nightly. Life: a constellation of vital phenomena - organization, irritability, movement,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the flash there's no final thought, no final reflection, just the breath carried from her body on the back of the bullet.

What's his name?

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

If ever there was a season for constipation it was winter.

When you're writing in big block paragraphs, you can afford to have a redundant sentence now and then, but the Twitter format requires concision.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was losing her incrementally ... As a web is no more than holes woven together, they were bonded by what was no longer there.

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

War is unnatural, it causes people to act unnaturally.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Never forget the first three letters of confidence.

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

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

She was as hard to pin down as the last pickle in the pickle jar.

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

The bookcase tipped and the book covers opened like wings over an underbelly of white feathers, dirty with ink.

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.

How often is immense sadness mistaken for courage?

We twist our souls around each other's miseries.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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]

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.

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

Kilometers above, men who didn't know her name wanted to kill her

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

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

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

Wars break things; they break stories.

Happiness came in moments of unpredictable loveliness.

To live with dignity meant a premature death.

When I visited Chechnya, I was taken aback at first because people would regularly make jokes about kidnapping me.

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

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

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