Anthony Marra
Anthony Marra
Anthony Marra is an American fiction writer...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
coward biographies said
You are a coward,' she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy.
stars dark light
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.
sadness often-is mistaken
How often is immense sadness mistaken for courage?
sister rooms bed
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.
stupid want maps
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.
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.
war people causes
War is unnatural, it causes people to act unnaturally.
sleep suffering causes
Sleep just a while longer, that's it, where else can you go where you neither suffer nor cause suffering.
moments unpredictable loveliness
Happiness came in moments of unpredictable loveliness.
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.
meaningful
Work isn't meaningful just because you spend your life doing it.
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.
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.
song mean emotional
A good mixtape didn't just gather together a bunch of love songs, but instead created an emotional narrative specific to your affection. The stories in most of my favorite collections are collected more like songs on a mixtape than, say, collected like spare change. By which I mean they are in conversation with each other and work to become larger than their parts.