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81 " If there is an operation, and if that operation is successful, she says she will move to Sweden. I fear for her future in a country whose citizenry is forced to assemble its own furniture. "
― Anthony Marra , The Tsar of Love and Techno
82 " The problem with rejection is that it feels imposed even when it's earned. "
83 " I have human friends, obviously. But everything's easier with a cat. He wants a little fish soup in a saucer and the occasional scratch on the head. I want the illusion that an animal bred to trade affection for food can understand the inquietudes of my soul. "
84 " Don't insult me. Everyone knows a turtle is a crustacean on its mother's side. "
― Anthony Marra , A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
85 " You have waited for me past the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, past each of Saturn's rings. It's ridiculous, so stupid, I know, to cross the entire solar system just to hear you and Galina butcher Tchaikovsky. If ever there was an utterance of perfection, it is this. If God has a voice, it is ours. "
86 " The trees they passed repeated on and on into the woods. None was remarkable when compared to the next, but each was individual in some small regard: the number of limbs, the girth of trunk, the circumference of shed leaves encircling the base. No more than minor peculiarities, but minor particularities were what transformed two eyes, a nose, and a mouth into a face. "
87 " They thought she knew what she was doing and she made their faith hers "
88 " 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. "
89 " Those who have the bullets also have the bandages. "
90 " Her father was her door to the world; he was the singular opening through which she saw, heard, and felt. Without him she didn’t know what she saw, or what she heard, and what she felt; all she felt, was him gone. "
91 " Kolya kissed her wide eyebrows, her neck, every square centimeter of her nose. The parts she mentally amputated were the ones he most adored. Beneath the sheets they were pale and naked and they pouched their hands in the warmth between their stomachs. They pressed together with a need that is never satisfied because we can't trade atoms how hard we thrust. Our hearts may skip but our substance remains fixed. We're not gaseous no matter how we sit to cloud together inseparably. Nothing less would have satisfied Kolya, nothing less than obliterating himself in her was sufficient. "
92 " [T]o some people ignorance is a sleeping mask they mistake for corrective lenses. "
93 " In order to become the chisel that breaks the marble inside us, the artist must first become the hammer." [Soviet censor of paintings and photos] "
94 " To say he felt guilty would ascribe to him ethical borders that were lines on a map of a country that no longer existed. At least, that's what he told himself. Better to deny the existence of objective morality than to live in its shadow. Better to tell yourself that the world of right and wrong is not the world you belong to. In the bathroom mirror he saw the face of a man his seventeen-year-old self would have disdained with the vanity of someone yet unaware of the many means the world has to break him. "
95 " I 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: theinstitutions we believe in will pervert us, our loved ones will fail us, and death is a falling piano. "
96 " Behind the ticket counter stood a man as skinny as a soaked poodle. He sported a shirt of swatch-sized plaid and a blond ponytail that, unless destined for a chemotherapy patient, should have been immediately chopped off, buried in an unmarked grave, and never spoken of again. Hipsterdom's a tightrope strung across the canyon of douche-baggery. He clung by a finger. "
97 " You can tell by the way I use my walk, I'm a woman's man,'Laina said,...'You know that song?' 'Of course. People used to recite it in the war. I didn't know it was a song. For the longest time I thought it was from the Qur'an. "
98 " I may be an idiot,” he said gravely, “but I would never eat a hamburger cooked by a clown. "
99 " ...she stood back and wiped the sweat-sting from her eyes. The air was clean. Her hands brown with dirt. Pride surged through her, raw and immense; she had believed happiness to be an absence - of fear, of pain, of grief - but here it roared in her as powerful as any sadness. "
100 " 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. "
