180 Quotes by Anthony Marra

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.