Anthony Marra
Anthony Marra
Anthony Marra is an American fiction writer...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
moments unpredictable loveliness
Happiness came in moments of unpredictable loveliness.
soul twists misery
You are mine. I recognize you. We twist our souls around each other's miseries. It is that which makes us family.
soul twists misery
We twist our souls around each other’s miseries.
definitions bugs exclusion
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.
memories years family-and-friends
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.
hands earth ends
Invader and invaded held on to their fistfuls of earth, but in the end, the earth outlived the hands that held it.
years drawing trying
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.
years different next
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.
letting-go running gratitude
She praised his book and he embraced her from gratitude rather than lust, but she didn't let go. Neither did he. She kissed his cheek, his earlobe. For months they'd run their fingers around the hem of their affection without once acknowledging the fabric. The circumference of the world tightened to what their arms encompassed. She sat on the desk, between the columns of read and unread manuscript, and pulled him toward her by his index fingers.
giving-up russia fiction
The short story that eventually grew into Constellation was the first fiction set in Russia that I'd ever written, and that was right around the time I was giving up on a doomed, never-to-be-seen first novel. While I saw it could be something bigger, in hindsight fortuitous timing was as responsible as anything.
coward biographies said
You are a coward,' she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy.
people regularly taken visited
When I visited Chechnya, I was taken aback at first because people would regularly make jokes about kidnapping me.
alone letting
Usually I spend a long while working alone before letting anyone read what I've written.
act behind came car crash family help hiding impending last line refusal statement warn
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.