A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
Anthony Marra
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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.”
“Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.”
“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.”
“She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.”
“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.”
“At the kitchen table she examined the glass of ice. Each cube was rounded by room temperature, dissolving in its own remains, and belatedly she understood that this was how a loved one disappeared. Despite the shock wave of walking into an empty flat, the absence isn’t immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the mast, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched 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.”
“How often is immense sadness mistaken for courage?”
“You are mine. I recognize you. We twist our souls around each other's miseries. It is that which makes us family.”
“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.”
“Invader and invaded held on to their fistfuls of earth, but in the end, the earth outlived the hands that held it.”
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Book Keywords:
humanity, civilization, definition, foreign, phenomena, self, constellation, life, language, mortality, fluency, vital
