“the absence isn’t immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the past, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched now 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
“But inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.”
— Anthony Marra
“The future is the lie with which we justify the brutality of the present.”
— Anthony Marra
“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.”
— Anthony Marra
“The girl’s face hollowed with resignation; it had been a long time, but Sonja remembered what it was to have that face, what it was to feel you were no brighter than the dumbest man, no stronger than the weakest boy, and with those ideas crowding your head no wonder subordination was the only inevitable outcome.”
— Anthony Marra
“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
“She felt as buoyantly patriotic as her Chechen classmates who could trace their family trees back to the acorns”
— Anthony Marra
“You will have the last word.’ ‘Your name will be that word.”
— Anthony Marra
“The past few months have been the most serene of his adult life. The megalopolis in his mind has quieted to a country road. He does his work, he eats his bread, and he sleeps with the knowledge that today hasn’t added to the sum of human misery. For now at least it’s peace of a kind he hadn’t imagined himself worthy of receiving.”
— Anthony Marra
“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.”
— Anthony Marra
“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
“No one can take what’s inside your head once it’s there.”
— Anthony Marra
“Then Brezhnev grabbed the wheel of power and captained the country with the exploratory heart of a municipal bus driver.”
— Anthony Marra