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61 " He was losing her incrementally...As a web is no more than holes woven together, they were bonded by what was no longer there. "
― Anthony Marra , A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
62 " For months they'd run their fingers around the hem of their affection without once acknowledging the fabric. "
63 " I guess our lives are all dreams – as real to us as they are meaningless to everyone else. "
― Anthony Marra , The Tsar of Love and Techno
64 " Work isn't meaningful just because you spend your life doing it. "
65 " I've always though Marx's view on religion was the one thing he got right. Faith is a crutch.''If you step on a land mine,' Akhmed said, "the crutch becomes the leg. "
66 " 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. "
67 " She was fluent in four languages and yet her fists against the rusted hood were the fullest articulation of her defeat. "
68 " Everything large enough to love eventually disappoints you, then betrays you, and finally, forgets you. But the things small enough to fit into a shoebox, these stay as they were. "
69 " 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. "
70 " Those smooth, spit-cleaned cheeks gave no indication of the dreams crowding her skull. Should she make it to adulthood, the girl would arrive with two hundred and six bones. Two and a half million sweat glands. Ninety-six thousand kilometers of blood vessels. Forty-six chromosomes. Seven meters of small intestines. Six hundred and six discrete muscles. One hundred billion cerebral neurons. Two kidneys. A liver. A heart. A hundred trillion cells that died and were replaced, again and again. But no matter how many ways she dismembered and quantified the body lying beside her, she couldn't say how many years the girl would wait before she married, if at all, or how many children she would have, if any; and between the creation of this body and its end lay the mystery the girl would spend her life solving. "
71 " 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. "
72 " 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. "
73 " Hipsterdom's a tightrope strung across the canyon of douche-baggery. He clung by a finger. "
74 " 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. "
75 " A lizard fucks a crab and nine months later a turtle pops out. It's called evolution. "
76 " The portrait artist must acknowledge human complexity with each brushstroke. The eyes, nose and mouth that compose a sitter's face, just like the suffering and joy that compose his soul, are similar to those of ten million others yet still singular to him. This acknowledgment is where art begins. It may also be where mercy begins. If criminals drew the faces of their victims before perpetrating their crimes and judges drew the faces of the guilty before sentencing them, then there would be no faces for executioners to draw. "
77 " You are a coward,' she said, and with that one word wrote a denunciation, a biography, and a prophecy. "
78 " The obvious is only obvious when it happens to someone else. "
79 " As someone whose days were defined by the ten thousand ways a human can hurt, she needed, now and then, to remember that the nervous system didn't exist exclusively to feel pain. "
80 " Happiness came in moments of unpredictable loveliness. "