01c. 1984 ADThen Brezhnev grabbed the wheel of power and captained the country with the exploratory heart of a municipal bus driver.Anthony Marra / quote ↗
03c. 1984 ADWe 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 / quote ↗
04c. 1984 ADAnd in the middle of the lake the woman I'd spoken with floated on her back, eyes closed, as if nothing in her many years had ever gone wrong.Anthony Marra / quote ↗
05c. 1984 ADThe past few months have been the most serene of his adult life. The megalopolis in his mind has quieted to a country road. He does his work, he eats his bread, and he sleeps with the knowledge that today hasn't added to the sum of human misery. For now at least it's peace of a kind he hadn't imagined himself worthy of receiving.Anthony Marra / quote ↗
07c. 1984 ADShe felt as buoyantly patriotic as her Chechen classmates who could trace their family trees back to the acornsAnthony Marra / quote ↗
08c. 1984 ADHer mother stared in quiet awe of this more artful rearrangement of her genetic code, and slipped into a contentedness that usually appeared only after the red wine had fallen below the bottle label.Anthony Marra / quote ↗
09c. 1984 ADThe girl's face hollowed with resignation; it had been a long time, but Sonja remembered what it was to have that face, what it was to feel you were no brighter than the dumbest man, no stronger than the weakest boy, and with those ideas crowding your head no wonder subordination was the only inevitable outcome.Anthony Marra / quote ↗
10c. 1984 ADTime became more important the closer to death one was, so an extra few hours to make peace with the world were worth more than years.Anthony Marra / quote ↗
11c. 1984 ADThe future is the lie with which we justify the brutality of the present.Anthony Marra / quote ↗
12c. 1984 ADBut inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce and that is who we are.Anthony Marra / quote ↗
13c. 1984 ADthe absence isn’t immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the past, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched now runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in the memory, but your fingers cannot hold it.Anthony Marra / quote ↗
14c. 1984 ADThe look on his face told her what had happened and that hurt burrowed deeper than anything she'd ever felt, deep enough to change from the thing she felt to the thing she was. Love, she learned, could reduce its recipient to an essential thing, as important as food or shelter, whose presence is not only longed for but needed.Anthony Marra / quote ↗
15c. 1984 ADWealth announces itself with what's easy to break and impossible to clean. The chairs were all curvy works of art that turned sitting into yoga exercises.Anthony Marra / quote ↗
18c. 1984 ADIf he had the cleft tongue of a devil, or the snake hair of a Medusa, or the matted hair of a wolf-monster, Akhmed might understand. But Ramazan had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, pairs of arms and legs and ears, hair greasy, but not slimy and certainly not slithering, and Akhmed did not understand.Anthony Marra / quote ↗
19c. 1984 ADWe know the meaning of nothing but the words we use to describe it.Anthony Marra / quote ↗
20c. 1984 ADShe wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.Anthony Marra / quote ↗
21c. 1984 ADYou shouldn't rush, he said. There are no taste buds in your stomach.Anthony Marra / quote ↗
22c. 1984 ADOn December 9, 1994, Yeltsin issued a statement ordering the Federal army to execute the disarmament of all illegal armed units in Chechnya, or as they were known locally, the government.Anthony Marra / quote ↗
23c. 1984 AD... hurt burrowed deeper than anything she'd ever felt, deep enough to change from the thing she felt to the thing she was.Anthony Marra / quote ↗
