Quotes from Anthony Doerr

Nothing that could fit on this page, or a hundred of these pages, would possibly accommodate all the things I should say to you, all the things you deserve to hear.

What we eat is a poem.

Does it matter? In memory, in story, in the end, we can remake our lives any way we need. To be surprised, truly and utterly surprised by what came into your life - this, Winkler was learning, was the true gift.

She was crying now, quietly, inhaling so vehemently it was as if she were trying to suck the tears back into her eyes.

Marie-Laure can hear a can opening, juice slopping into a bowl. Seconds later, she's eating wedges of wet sunlight.

Sublimity," Hauptmann says, panting, "you know what that is, Pfennig?" He is tipsy, animated, almost prattling. Never has Werner seen him like this. "It's the instant when one thing is about to become something else. Day to night, caterpillar to butterfly. Fawn to doe. Experiment to result. Boy to man.

He wants to tell her what he has learned about the miracles of light, the way a day's light fluxes in tides: pale and gleaming at dawn, the glare of noon, the gold of evening, the promise of twilight -- every second of every day has its own magic. He wants to tell her that when things vanish they become something else, in death we rise again in the blades of grass, the splitting bodies of seeds.

She has no memories of her mother but imagines her as white, a soundless brilliance. Her father radiates a thousand colors, opal, strawberry red, deep russet, wild green; a smell like oil and metal, the feel of a lock tumbler sliding home, the sound of his key rings chiming as he walks.

The war that killed your grandfather killed sixteen million others. One and a half million French boys alone, most of them younger than I was. Two million on the German side. March the dead in a single-file line, and for eleven days and eleven nights, they'd walk past our door.

Somewhere, someone is figuring out how to push back the hood of grief, but Marie-Laure cannot. Not yet. The truth is that she is a disabled girl with no home and no parents.

The quiet is fretful, unnatural. It's what a mouse must feel as it steps from its hole and into the open blades of a meadow, never knowing what shadow might come cruising above.

Frederick said we don't have choices, don't own our lives, but in the end it was Werner who pretended there were no choices, Werner who watched Frederick dump the pail of water at his feet—I will not— Werner who stood by as the consequences came raining down. Werner who watched Volkheimer wade into house after house, the same ravening nightmare recurring over and over and over.

he laughs a pure, contagious laugh, one she will try to remember all her life

This was a life, this was how people chose to live? Somewhere inside she could feel winds dying, the gales of her youth stifled. She was learning that in her life everything— health, happiness, even love—was subject to the landscape; the weathers of the world were inseparable from the weathers of her soul.

Behind her leg a shy little girl - Grace - smiling up. "Dad?" It was a kind hope. But his dreams spoke to none of that: when he slept he dreamt of darkness, or of people he did not recognize, or of water closing slowly, almost gratefully, over his head.

Abrid los ojos —concluye el hombre— y observad todo lo que podáis antes de cerrarlos para siempre».

Did dreams, he wondered, when they arrived, make a sound? The smallest kind, like the noise of an embryo being conceived, or a snowflake touching down?

In a life you accumulate so many memories, your brain constantly winnowing through them, weighing consequence, burying pain, but somehow by the time you're this age you still end up dragging a monumental sack of memories behind you, a burden as heavy as a continent, and eventually it becomes time to take them out of the world.

I saved her only to hear her die.

But over these past few weeks, her existence has become tolerable. At least, out on the beaches, her privation and fear are rinsed away by wind and color and light. Most

To select one word was to commit to a single path when the maze contains thousands.

Whoever wins, that's who decides the history.

Dust floats through the feeble beam of the flashlight: ten thousand particles, turning softly, twinkling.

There is only chance in this world, chance and physics.