Quotes from Anthony Doerr

But what was family? Surely more than genes, eye color, flesh. Family was story: truth and struggle and retribution. Family was time. If he had learned anything it was the family was not so much what you were given as what you were able to maintain.

Studying ice crystals as a graduate student, he eventually found the basic design (equilateral, equiangled hexagon) so icily repeated, so unerringly conforming, that he couldn't help but shudder: Beneath the splendor--the filigreed blossoms, the microscopic stars--was a ghastly inevitability; crystals could not escape their embedded blueprints any more than humans could. Everything hewed to a rigidity of pattern, the certainty of death.

It was not,' said Jutta, reaching the limits of her French, 'very easy to be good then.

Open your eyes, concludes the man, and see what you can with them before they close forever

In the infinite permutations of an ice crystal, everything repeats itself, but, really, from another point of view, nothing repeats itself. The arms go out, forming dendrites, sectored plates, the same angle every time, but the final product – because of wind, because of molecular vibration, because of rate of growth and temperature – is never the same.

At Madame's suggestion, they lie down in the weeds, and Marie-Laure listens to honeybees mine the flowers and tries to imagine their journeys as Etienne described them: each worker following a rivulet of odor, looking for ultraviolet patterns in the flowers, filling baskets on her hind legs with pollen grains, then navigating, drunk and heavy, all the way home. How

What is blindness? Where there should be a wall, her hands find nothing. Where there should be nothing, a table leg gouges her shin. Cars growl in the streets; leaves whisper in the sky; blood rustles through her inner ears. In the stairwell, in the kitchen, even beside her bed, grown-up voices speak of despair.

His heart was a catapult in his chest.

Piensa en los obstáculos como en oportunidades, Reinhold. Piensa en los obstáculos como inspiraciones».

But the cracks were splitting, finding power, thickening into chasms.

The despair doesn't last. Marie-Laure is too young and her father is too patient.

Out here the prisoners see the shells smash into the city before they hear them. During the last war, Etienne knew artillerymen who could peer through field glasses and discern their shells' damage by the colors thrown skyward. Gray was stone. Brown was soil. Pink was flesh.

She has had two lovers. The first was a visiting scientist who never returned, and the second was a Canadian named John who scattered things—ties, coins, socks, breath mints—around any room he entered.

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.

we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother's birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.

Frederick's dreaminess, his otherness—it's on him like a scent, and everyone can smell it.

In the scullery she says, if the end of the world is upon them, they might as well finish all the wine.

what I want to write about today is the sea. It contains so many colors. Silver at dawn, green at noon, dark blue in the evening. Sometimes it looks almost red. Or it will turn the color of old coins. Right now the shadows of clouds are dragging across it, and patches of sunlight are touching down everywhere. White strings of gulls drag over it like beads. It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen.

Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world. We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.

Cuando perdí la vista, Werner, la gente me decía que era valiente. Cuando mi padre se marchó, la gente me dijo que era valiente. Pero no se trata de valentía, es que no tengo otra opción. Me despierto y vivo mi vida, ¿acaso no haces tú lo mismo?

There is a humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing. That's how it feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing her hair: as though his lve for his daughter will outstrip the limits of his body. The walls could fall away, even the whole city, and the brightness of that feeling would not wane.

Still," he says, "certain things compel people. Pearls, for example, and sinistral shells, shells with a left-handed opening. Even the best scientists feel the urge now and then to put something in a pocket. That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much. Only the strongest people can turn away from feelings like that.

Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitrary. Winkler was still on an airplane, hurtling north, but he was also pushing farther back, sinking deeper into the overlaps, to the years before he even had a daughter, before he had even dreamed of the woman who would become his wife.

We act in the interest of peace.