“ On 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
“ She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency. Anthony Marra
“ If 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 le… Anthony Marra
“ Wealth 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
“ The 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, coul… Anthony Marra
“ The missing remained missing and the portraits couldn't change that. But when Akhmed slid the finished portrait across the desk and the family saw the shape of that beloved nose, the air would flee th… Anthony Marra
“ The 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 per… Anthony Marra
“ Time 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
“ The 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… Anthony Marra
“ Her 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
“ She felt as buoyantly patriotic as her Chechen classmates who could trace their family trees back to the acorns Anthony Marra
“ The 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 t… Anthony Marra
“ And 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
