Anthony Marra > Quotes

“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.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“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.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“You remain the hero of your own story even when you become the villain of someone else's.”
― Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno

“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, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“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.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“How often is immense sadness mistaken for courage?”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“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.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“You are mine. I recognize you. We twist our souls around each other's miseries. It is that which makes us family.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“Invader and invaded held on to their fistfuls of earth, but in the end, the earth outlived the hands that held it.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“Turning I would to I did is the grammar of growing up.”
― Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno

“But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.”
― Anthony Marra , A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“The calcium in collarbones I have kissed. The iron in the blood flushing those cheeks. We imprint our intimacies upon atoms born from an explosion so great it still marks the emptiness of space. A shimmer of photons bears the memory across the long dark amnesia. We will be carried too, mysterious particles that we are.”
― Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno

“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.”
― Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno

“The future is the lie with which we justify the brutality of the present.”
― Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno

“For months they'd run their fingers around the hem of their affection without once acknowledging the fabric.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“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, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“There are so many paths to contentment if you're open to self-delusion.”
― Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno

“I guess our lives are all dreams – as real to us as they are meaningless to everyone else.”
― Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno

“Work isn't meaningful just because you spend your life doing it.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“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, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“She was fluent in four languages and yet her fists against the rusted hood were the fullest articulation of her defeat.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“Love, she learned, could reduce its recipient to an essential thing, as important as food or shelter, whose presence is not only longed for but needed.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“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, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“Those smooth, spit-cleaned cheeks gave no indication of the dreams crowding her skull. Should she make it to adulthood, the girl would arrive with two hundred and six bones. Two and a half million sweat glands. Ninety-six thousand kilometers of blood vessels. Forty-six chromosomes. Seven meters of small intestines. Six hundred and six discrete muscles. One hundred billion cerebral neurons. Two kidneys. A liver. A heart. A hundred trillion cells that died and were replaced, again and again. But no matter how many ways she dismembered and quantified the body lying beside her, she couldn't say how many years the girl would wait before she married, if at all, or how many children she would have, if any; and between the creation of this body and its end lay the mystery the girl would spend her life solving.”
― anthony marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“A single whisper can be quite a disturbance when the rest of the audience is silent.”
― Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno

“Everything large enough to love eventually disappoints you, then betrays you, and finally, forgets you. But the things small enough to fit into a shoebox, these stay as they were.”
― Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno

“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, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“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.”
― Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena