Top 100 Anthony Marra Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You remain the hero of your own story even when you become the villain of someone else’s.”

— Anthony Marra

2. “Life: a constellation of vital phenomena – organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.”

— Anthony Marra

3. “Inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce, and that is who we are.”

— Anthony Marra

4. “How often is immense sadness mistaken for courage?”

— Anthony Marra

5. “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

6. “To live with dignity meant a premature death.”

— Anthony Marra

7. “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

8. “We know the meaning of nothing but the words we use to describe it.”

— Anthony Marra

9. “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

10. “Happiness came in moments of unpredictable loveliness.”

— Anthony Marra

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

— Anthony Marra

12. “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

13. “She was fluent in four languages and yet her fists against the rusted hood were the fullest articulation of her defeat.”

— Anthony Marra

14. “There are so many paths to contentment if you’re open to self-delusion.”

— Anthony Marra

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

— Anthony Marra

16. “The future is the lie with which we justify the brutality of the present.”

— Anthony Marra

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

— Anthony Marra

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “As someone whose days were defined by the ten thousand ways a human can hurt, she needed, now and then, to remember that the nervous system didn’t exist exclusively to feel pain.”

— Anthony Marra

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “I’d 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.”

— Anthony Marra

26. “War is unnatural, it causes people to act unnaturally.”

— Anthony Marra

27. “In the months before the repatriation her heart had hardened around her sister’s absence, letting her love Natasha in memory as she could never love her in reality.”

— Anthony Marra

28. “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

29. “Work isn’t meaningful just because you spend your life doing it.”

— Anthony Marra

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

— Anthony Marra

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

— Anthony Marra

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

— Anthony Marra

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

36. “The television dramas we grew up on, stories of star-crossed lovers, stories of love overcoming all obstacles, well, they’re all fairy tales, obviously, like the television news; but the obvious is only obvious when it happens to someone else.”

— Anthony Marra

37. “The stomach is not the only vital organ that hungers.”

— Anthony Marra

38. “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

39. “Hipsterdom’s a tightrope strung across the canyon of douche-baggery. He clung by a finger.”

— Anthony Marra

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

— Anthony Marra

41. “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

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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.”

— Anthony Marra

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

— Anthony Marra

46. “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

47. “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.”

— Anthony Marra

48. “The problem with Christianity of course, is the Christians.”

— Anthony Marra

49. “We took a sledgehammer to the rules of English and reassembled the pieces into a language only we understood.”

— Anthony Marra

50. “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.”

— Anthony Marra