Quote

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

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Anthony Marra
Age: 40
Born: 1984
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Washington
District of Columbia
Knew
Blades
Nothing
Pencils
Every
Bugs
Things
Dictionary
Fulfill
Requiring
Definitions
Blade
Grass
Exclusion
Defined
Pencil

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Inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce, and that is who we are.
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Sometimes it bursts from your imagination fully formed, sometimes you absorb from nonfiction, sometimes you're able to imprint your own autobiographical experiences on a world you never yourself were a part of. A decent number of the one-liners in the title story originally came up in conversations with my girlfriend or my neighbor.
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Invader and invaded held on to their fistfuls of earth, but in the end, the earth outlived the hands that held it.
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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.
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She was fluent in four languages and yet her fists against the rusted hood were the fullest articulation of her defeat.
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How often is immense sadness mistaken for courage?
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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.
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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.
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War is unnatural, it causes people to act unnaturally.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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Work isn't meaningful just because you spend your life doing it.
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What parts had she discarded for the sake of her sanity? What had she cut from herself? Had he stared into her pupils he would have emerged, bewildered and blinking, on the far side of the earth. Was he awed by her? Absolutely. Did he respect her? Unequivocally. Want to be anything like her? No, never, not at all.
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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.
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Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.
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Sleep just a while longer, that's it, where else can you go where you neither suffer nor cause suffering.
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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.
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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.
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