Top 100 Anthony Marra Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “If God has a voice, it is ours.”

— Anthony Marra

52. “He is very good at chess,” the girl snapped, and glared at Akhmed. Grammar was the only place the girl could keep her father alive, and after amending Akhmed’s statement, she leaned back against the wall and with small, certain breaths, said is is is. 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

53. “Never forget the first three letters of confidence.”

— Anthony Marra

54. “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

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

— Anthony Marra

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

— Anthony Marra

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

— Anthony Marra

58. “You have waited for me past the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, past each of Saturn’s rings. It’s ridiculous, so stupid, I know, to cross the entire solar system just to hear you and Galina butcher Tchaikovsky. If ever there was an utterance of perfection, it is this. If God has a voice, it is ours.”

— Anthony Marra

59. “By that point a career change was beyond consideration; he was a bottle, thrown to the sea, into which the villagers had folded their wishes, and though he was willing to give up on himself, he wasn’t willing to let down those who believed he could carry them over the water.”

— Anthony Marra

60. “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

61. “Even as a child she had hated children; she still did.”

— Anthony Marra

62. “She was as hard to pin down as the last pickle in the pickle jar.”

— Anthony Marra

63. “I have human friends, obviously. But everything’s easier with a cat. He wants a little fish soup in a saucer and the occasional scratch on the head. I want the illusion that an animal bred to trade affection for food can understand the inquietudes of my soul.”

— Anthony Marra

64. “No one likes a braggart, and to praise your children is to curse them with misfortune, but we admit it, if only in secret, if only to ourselves: We are proud, we are so proud of them. We’ve given them all we can, but our greatest gift has been to imprint upon them our own ordinariness. They may begrudge us, may think us unambitious and narrow-minded, but someday they will realize that what makes them unremarkable is what kept them alive.”

— Anthony Marra

65. “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

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

— Anthony Marra

67. “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.”

— Anthony Marra

68. “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

69. “Akhmed summoned the arborist with small declarative memories, and Sonja let him go on longer than she otherwise would because she, too, had tried to resurrect by recitation, had tried to recreate the thing by drawing its shape in cinders, and hoped that by compiling lists of Natasha’s favorite foods and songs and annoying habits, her sister might spontaneously materialize under the pressure of the particularities.”

— Anthony Marra

70. “The problem with rejection is that it feels imposed even when it’s earned.”

— Anthony Marra

71. “The central question was how to trick tourists into coming to Grozny voluntarily. For inspiration, I studied pamphlets from the tourist bureaus of other urban hellscapes: Baghdad, Pyongyang, Houston.”

— Anthony Marra

72. “The obvious is only obvious when it happens to someone else.”

— Anthony Marra

73. “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.”

— Anthony Marra

74. “When I pick up a book and read it, I want to be transported. I want to be taken someplace that I didn’t quite know existed, so that by the time I close the book, and return to my own reality, my world is expanded and has become a little larger and a little more complicated.”

— Anthony Marra

75. “In the flash there’s no final thought, no final reflection, just the breath carried from her body on the back of the bullet.”

— Anthony Marra

76. “You shouldn’t rush, he said. There are no taste buds in your stomach.”

— Anthony Marra

77. “When he felt like a criminal, he reminded himself that a land without law is a land without crime.”

— Anthony Marra

78. “There are more ways to remember one person than there are people in the world.”

— Anthony Marra

79. “He had memorized the entire Qur’an and lectured on the nature of evil, which, like a shadow, cannot exist independently of the good silhouettes.”

— Anthony Marra

80. “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

81. “There were days when Earth’s small glories were luminous enough to dim church icons to duller golds. Diving from the roof into fresh snow. Throwing dishes from the window after Mother’s funeral. I have been blessed.”

— Anthony Marra

82. “Kilometers above, men who didn’t know her name wanted to kill her.”

— Anthony Marra

83. “Sleep just a while longer, that’s it, where else can you go where you neither suffer nor cause suffering.”

— Anthony Marra

84. “Of course he was required to wear a seat belt, just as he was required to give directions to a torture camp, because stupidity was the single abiding law of the universe.”

— Anthony Marra

85. “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.”

— Anthony Marra

86. “Behind the ticket counter stood a man as skinny as a soaked poodle. He sported a shirt of swatch-sized plaid and a blond ponytail that, unless destined for a chemotherapy patient, should have been immediately chopped off, buried in an unmarked grave, and never spoken of again. Hipsterdom’s a tightrope strung across the canyon of douche-baggery. He clung by a finger.”

— Anthony Marra

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

— Anthony Marra

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

— Anthony Marra

89. “What divine imagination could conjure something so imperfect as life?”

— Anthony Marra

90. “You will have the last word.′ ‘Your name will be that word.”

— Anthony Marra

91. “His face was broken in a way Akhmed couldn’t look at, let alone understand, let alone mend.”

— Anthony Marra

92. “Havaa, standing on a stepstool and stirring the broth, found an unfamiliar gratitude for the smallness of her life. Everywhere beyond these four walls smelled of smoke and gasoline, but here, no calamity was greater than an egg falling to the floor.”

— Anthony Marra

93. “Too young to explain in words, the girl’s face was old enough to show the loss that was that name.”

— Anthony Marra

94. “He’s an excellent listener. Most cats are. Except Siameses, the chatty little bastards. I.”

— Anthony Marra

95. “No one can take what’s inside your head once it’s there.”

— Anthony Marra

96. “Our spirit animals were all of the genus American Kingpin Tragically Slain in His Prime. Our parents learned English from the Beatles, but we learned from Biggie.”

— Anthony Marra

97. “The better you know someone the less understandable they become. That’s what intimacy is – not a threshold of knowledge but a capitulation to ignorance, an acceptance that another person is made as bewildered and ungovernable by her life as you are by yours.”

— Anthony Marra

98. “They were building a life of small kindnesses together. Some days it was extraordinary.”

— Anthony Marra

99. “But to some people ignorance is a sleeping mask they mistake for corrective lenses.”

— Anthony Marra

100. “Those who can’t succeed, teach.”

— Anthony Marra