Anthony Marra - A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2013)

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He was losing her incrementally. It might be a few stray hairs listless on the pillow, or the crescents of bitten fingernails tossed behind the headboard, or a dark shape dissolving in soap. As a net is no more than holes tied together, they were bonded by what was no longer there.

Anthony Marra
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.

Anthony Marra
Work isn't meaningful just because you spend your life doing it.

Anthony Marra
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?

Anthony Marra
Sleep just a while longer, that's it, where else can you go where you neither suffer nor cause suffering.

Anthony Marra
You are mine. I recognize you. We twist our souls around each other's miseries. It is that which makes us family.

Anthony Marra
Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.

Anthony Marra
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.

Anthony Marra
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.

Anthony Marra
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.

Anthony Marra
You are a coward,' she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy.

Anthony Marra
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.

Anthony Marra
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
Invader and invaded held on to their fistfuls of earth, but in the end, the earth outlived the hands that held it.

Anthony Marra
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.

Anthony Marra
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.

Anthony Marra
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.

Anthony Marra
She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.

Anthony Marra
She was fluent in four languages and yet her fists against the rusted hood were the fullest articulation of her defeat.

Anthony Marra