Anthony Marra quotes

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

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

You remain the hero of your own story even when you become the villain of someone else’s.
- Anthony Marra

Inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce, and that is who we are.
- Anthony Marra

How often is immense sadness mistaken for courage?
- Anthony Marra

We all know to feel sympathy for those who’ve suffered from drug addiction, child abuse, and terminal illness, so the set up elicits an emotional response that the story itself very well may not earn. Energy generated by the fiction itself is likely to produce more light.
- Anthony Marra

Happiness came in moments of unpredictable loveliness.
- Anthony Marra

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of all things to fulfill its own.
- Anthony Marra

There are so many paths to contentment if you’re open to self-delusion.
- Anthony Marra

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

War is unnatural, it causes people to act unnaturally.
- Anthony Marra

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

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

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.
- Anthony Marra

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

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

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.
- Anthony Marra

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

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