The Tsar of Love and Techno

by Anthony Marra

If heaven can only exist on earth, then God can only be a human.

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.

“You think you narrate your own story, but you’re only the blank page.”

If one were to compile a dictionary of Soviet Russian, the first definition of each entry would be submit.

Because the future is the lie with which we justify the brutality of the present.

i know that belief is the last thing I own. even when everything is gone? that’s the point, the seminarian taps. not everything goes.

you might question a belief that so readily betrays its believers.

We never knew them, but we are the proof they existed.

on grandmothers

the obvious is only obvious when it happens to someone else.

it stung, this hard slap of realization, when we understood that our mothers had been right: Teenagers yearn for freedom; adults yearn for security.

Our children forever changed our relationships with our mothers. Pity replaced the mild contempt with which we had previously regarded them, and we loved them as we never had before, as we could only love ourselves, because despite our best intentions we had become them.

And so my future was decided, as it often is, entirely without my consent.

I know I have purposefully made myself into a crutch she cannot risk discarding. What I don’t know is whether I’ve done so out of love or loneliness, or if in this upside-down world where roofs lie on streets, intentions have lost their moral weight altogether.

He does his work, he eats his bread, and he sleeps with the knowledge that today hasn’t added to the sum of human misery.

serenity

If a stopped clock is right twice a day, a bad haircut is right twice a decade.

There are more ways to remember one person than there are people in the world.

Turning I would to I did is the grammar of growing up.

There are so many paths to contentment if you’re open to self-delusion.

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.

Better the dim heat of a hand in yours than all the fire in the sky.

I am turning to dust. Soon I will suffocate me.