Anthony Marra Quotes

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

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.

Those who have the bullets also have the bandages.

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

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.

When I came to the last line of 'Car Crash While Hitchhiking,' I read it as a pitiless statement of indifference: a refusal to warn the family of their impending collision, a refusal to help when miraculously spared, a refusal to act on the empathy hiding behind the story's language.

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

We were so awkward, morning pimples in the mirror, hair where we never wanted it, and we thought of the lung cancer X-ray that was the album art for Surfin' Safari, considered the ways a body betrays its soul, and wondered if growing up was its own kind of pathology. We fell in and out of love with fevered frequency. We constantly became people we would later regret having been.

The idea that fiction can capture the stories that fall through the cracks of history informed 'A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,' which progresses across the two Chechen Wars of the 1990s and early 2000s.

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.

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.

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

Calvin and Hobbes are the only two characters from my childhood reading that I return to with any regularity, and they have grown with me, yielding newer and deeper meaning.

If he had the cleft tongue of a devil, or the snake hair of a Medusa, or the matted hair of a wolf-monster, Akhmed might understand. But Ramazan had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, pairs of arms and legs and ears, hair greasy, but not slimy and certainly not slithering, and Akhmed did not understand.

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

A mother comforts, a mother cleans. A mother gives when any reasonable person would deny. Life might affix any number of labels to Vera- Russian, pensioner, widow, daughter- but when she looked to her washed-out reflection in the bathroom mirror, she saw only Lydia's mother.

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.

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

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

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.

Wealth announces itself with what's easy to break and impossible to clean. The chairs were all curvy works of art that turned sitting into yoga exercises.

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.

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.

My father says persistence is a polite way of being annoying.

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

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

If there is an operation, and if that operation is successful, she says she will move to Sweden. I fear for her future in a country whose citizenry is forced to assemble its own furniture.

The missing remained missing and the portraits couldn't change that. But when Akhmed slid the finished portrait across the desk and the family saw the shape of that beloved nose, the air would flee the room, replaced by the miracle of recognition as mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, and cousin found in that nose the son, brother, nephew, and cousin that had been, would have been, could have been, and they might race after the possibility like cartoon characters dashing off a cliff, held by the certainty of the road until they looked down -- and plummeted is the word used by the youngest brother who, at the age of sixteen, is tired of being the youngest and hopes his older brother will return for many reasons, not least so he will marry and have a child and the youngest brother will no longer be youngest; that youngest brother, the one who has nothing to say about the nose because he remembers his older brother's nose and doesn't need the nose to mean what his parents need it to mean, is the one who six months later would be disappeared in the back of a truck, as his older brother was, who would know the Landfill through his blindfold and gag by the rich scent of clay, as his older brother had known, whose fingers would be wound with the electrical wires that had welded to his older brother's bones, who would stand above a mass grave his brother had dug and would fall in it as his older brother had, though taking six more minutes and four more bullets to die, would be bur

He spent the morning following her, nodding politely as she denounced the Russians for various earthly ills, and a few - volcanoes, winter, her arthritic hips - that fell within God's jurisdiction.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

During the 20th century, Chechnya was written about by local poets and novelists, as well as writers from Russia and Central Asia, but very little is available in English translation.

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

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

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

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

You want to get out?" He said. "Who doesn't?".

"I can do well in the West".

"Anyone can do well when they aren't dodging bullets.

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

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

If you work hard, and give up certain things, and yes, resort to bribery now and then, you'll be an arborist, or a sea anemonist, or anything else you want.

You look at a surgeon as you would a secular priest, almost, if it's your child, if it's your sister on the operating table. That was an idea that very much has interested me and I've wanted to explore for some time.

Happiness came in moments of unpredictable loveliness.

In a shuddering voice her father kept asking the pale-faced woman - who looked like her mother and wore her mother's apron but couldn't be her mother - for forgiveness. If she had been dying every minute of every day, they might have been a happy family. The blood consumed every centimeter of apron cloth and Havaa was afraid the wound would become hers if she came too close. Her mother stirred, looked to her father, and wrapped her five fingers over his none. She opened her mouth, but he shook his head, told her to save her breath, and Havaa would always remember how he had shushed what might have been her good-bye so that she could breathe.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The interrogation has succeeded; I am now an enemy of the state. ... I have become a violent act of reality inflicted upon the fiction of which we are both citizens. I want him to know that I understand this, that every thump of his truncheon hardens my resolve, that he has my permission.

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

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

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

... the error in the lie that is the truth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I never imagined that something as solemn and final as death could be this idiotic. It was the keyhole through which I first glimpsed life's madness: the
institutions we believe in will pervert us, our loved ones will fail us, and death is a falling piano.

A third of the houses were ruined by fire or explosions, or even by the former occupants themselves, who, like farmers sowing their fields with salt, believed destruction to be the final act of ownership.

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.

All I'm trying to say is don't trust someone who posts photots of himself playing with puppies and kittens online. Chance are, they're sociopaths.

I wanted to be a writer, but at the time, I spent my days working a retail job, my nights sleeping in my childhood bedroom, and while I had written short stories here and there, I didn't know how to write good fiction anymore than I knew how to perform good brain surgery.

When confronted with the facts of foreign atrocities, the experience is often consigned to the realm of the unimaginable. Fiction makes the unimaginable imaginable.

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. For now, she slept.

Akhmed's eight-day-old eyes had held the reflection of ten thousand possible lives. Khassan wasn't an emotive or superstitious man, and nothing like it had ever happened again, but he had found, layered in the infant's half-lidded eyes, innumerable, wanting faces, none of which he had recognized.

To live with dignity meant a premature death.

Kolya kissed her wide eyebrows, her neck, every square centimeter of her nose. The parts she mentally amputated were the ones he most adored. Beneath the sheets they were pale and naked and they pouched their hands in the warmth between their stomachs. They pressed together with a need that is never satisfied because we can't trade atoms how hard we thrust. Our hearts may skip but our substance remains fixed. We're not gaseous no matter how we sit to cloud together inseparably. Nothing less would have satisfied Kolya, nothing less than obliterating himself in her was sufficient.

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

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

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]

It's hard to think of another body of work that is more universally beloved - I don't think I've ever met someone who has encountered 'Calvin and Hobbes' without falling for them.

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

Everyone knew Sonja was destined for great things, but no one knew what to do with her until then. Even in academia, her natural habitat, she was an exotic species. Though her Russianness gave her certain dispensations, the idea that a young woman of any ethnicity could so excel in the hard sciences was a far-fetched fantasy. Their parents encouraged her at a distance. Neither understood the molecular formulas, electromagnetic fields, or anatomical minutiae that so captivated her, and so their support came by way of well-intentioned, inadequate generalities. 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. Natasha was beautiful and charming. They didn't need MDs to know how to be proud of her.

After crossing herself, she lay back on the divan and squirted a cool puddle of hand lotion from the bottle she'd brought from London. Invariably she would apply too much, and her hands would be slick and shiny in the candlelight as she asked for another pair with which to share the excess.

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

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.

For the years I spent working on it, 'Constellation' was the only novel I knew how to write, so maybe I still abided by the maxim? Regardless, I prefer the maxim: Write what you want to know, rather than what you already know.

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.

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

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.

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.

Never forget the first three letters of confidence.

I guess our lives are all dreams – as real to us as they are meaningless to everyone else.

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

We twist our souls around each other's miseries.