A good mixtape didn't just gather together a bunch of love songs, but instead created an emotional narrative specific to your affection. The stories in most of my favorite collections are collected more like songs on a mixtape than, say, collected like spare change. By which I mean they are in conversation with each other and work to become larger than their parts.

Anthony Marra

Categorized in : Mean Song Emotional

Inside us there is a word we cannot pronounce, and that is who we are.

Anthony Marra

who-we-are

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

Anthony Marra

mint fluency tongue

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

clothes civilization believe

My work often begins as little internal dares, wondering if I can pull something off. So I spent a few years drawing these stories together, trying to build a Pangea of what began as separate continents.

Anthony Marra

drawing together years

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

new-words deepest-love love-is

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

quota miracle numbers

For their entire lives, even before they met you, your mother and father held their love for you inside their hearts like an acorn holds an oak tree.

Anthony Marra

mother heart father

In my own work, humor is necessary, for the reasons stated above, but also because forbidding your characters silliness, absurdity, irony, and vulgarity forbids them aspects of the human experience every bit as universal as sorrow.

Anthony Marra

irony sorrow character

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

stars light dark

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

morning night father

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

Anthony Marra

growth movement organization

Sometimes it bursts from your imagination fully formed, sometimes you absorb from nonfiction, sometimes you're able to imprint your own autobiographical experiences on a world you never yourself were a part of. A decent number of the one-liners in the title story originally came up in conversations with my girlfriend or my neighbor.

Anthony Marra

girlfriend imagination numbers

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

gratitude letting-go running

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

next different years

We twist our souls around each other’s miseries.

Anthony Marra

twists misery soul

Anytime I can get either of them really laughing, I immediately pull out a pad of paper write the joke down, regardless of where we are or what we're doing. I must be absolutely insufferable.

Anthony Marra

paper writing laughing

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

Anthony Marra

ends earth hands

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

family-and-friends memories years

War is unnatural, it causes people to act unnaturally.

Anthony Marra

causes war people

Happiness came in moments of unpredictable loveliness.

Anthony Marra

loveliness unpredictable moments