Anthony Marra Quotes

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

  Anthony Marra

  Tongue, Fluency, Mint

  Anthony Marra (2013). “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena”, p.350, Random House

  45 Copy quote

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

  Anthony Marra

  Who We Are

  27 Copy quote

• 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

  Numbers, Miracle, Quota

  Anthony Marra (2013). “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena”, p.51, Random House

  15 Copy quote

• 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

  Believe, Civilization, Clothes

  Anthony Marra (2013). “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena”, p.339, Random House

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Love Is, Deepest Love, New Words

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Mother, Father, Heart

  8 Copy quote

• Happiness came in moments of unpredictable loveliness.

  Anthony Marra

  Moments, Unpredictable, Loveliness

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Drawing, Years, Together

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Memories, Years, Family And Friends

  Anthony Marra (2013). “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena”, p.132, Random House

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Dark, Hair, Together

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Character, Sorrow, Irony

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• War is unnatural, it causes people to act unnaturally.

  Anthony Marra

  War, People, Causes

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Children, Sadness, Addiction

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• How often is immense sadness mistaken for courage?

  Anthony Marra

  Sadness, Often Is, Mistaken

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Anthony Marra

  Years, Different, Next

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Cutting, Earth, Want

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Morning, Father, Night

  Anthony Marra (2013). “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena”, p.16, Random House

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Stars, Dark, Light

  8 Copy quote

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

  Anthony Marra

  Organization, Growth, Movement

  7 Copy quote

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

  Anthony Marra

  Soul, Twists, Misery

  4 Copy quote

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

  Anthony Marra

  Meaningful

  Anthony Marra (2013). “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena”, p.54, Random House

  5 Copy quote

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

  Anthony Marra

  Sleep, Suffering, Causes

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Anthony Marra

  Writing, Laughing, Paper

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Sister, Bed, Rooms

  7 Copy quote

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

  Anthony Marra

  Coward, Biographies, Said

  4 Copy quote

You May Also Like:

Alice McDermott

Rachel Kushner

Ruth Ozeki

Philipp Meyer

Adrian Matejka

NoViolet Bulawayo

Ann Patchett

Sheri Fink