Quotes from Anthony Doerr

Sometimes," he says, "when I feel like working, I just sit and wait for the feeling to pass

You know how diamonds—how all crystals—grow, Laurette? By adding microscopic layers, a few thousand atoms every month, each atop the next. Millennia after millennia. That's how stories accumulate too.

He is a ghost. He is from some other world. He is Papa, Madame Manec, Etienne; he is everyone who has left her finally coming back. Through the panel he calls, "I am not killing you. I am hearing you. On radio. Is why I come." He pauses, fumbling to translate. "The song, light of the moon?" She almost smiles.

Te parece correcto —le pregunta— hacer algo solo porque todo el mundo lo hace?

Maybe living was no more than getting swept over a riverbed and eventually out to sea, no choices to make, only the vast, formless ocean ahead, the frothing waves, the lightless tomb of its depths.

Repository," he finally says, "you know this word? A resting place. A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.

How few days are left in the lives of anyone. How few hours.

No," she says. "I want to believe that Papa hasn't been anywhere near it.

But to raise one's hopes is to risk their falling further.

When lightning strikes at sea, why don't all the fish die?

Memory is a house with ten thousand rooms; it is a village slated to be inundated.

God's truth? How long do these intolerable moments last for God? A trillionth of second? The very life of any creature is a quick-fading spark in fathomless darkness. That's God's truth.

I always thought, or imagined, that there were these invisible lines trembling in our wake, outlining our trajectories through life, throbbing with electric energy. Lines that sometimes cross one other, or follow in parallel ellipses without ever touching, or meet up for one brief moment and then part. A universe of lines crisscrossing in the void.

Ninth-grade U.S. history: Not to hurt feelings but that chapter you assigned? That was all "Columbus is great," "The Indians sure loved Thanksgiving," "Let's brainwash everyone." I found way better stuff at the library

From outside comes a light tinkling, fragments of glass, perhaps, falling into the streets. It sounds both beautiful and strange, as though gemstones were raining from the sky.

How? How did Jutta understand so much more about how the world worked? While he knew so little?

Ignorance was, in the end, and in so many ways, a privilege: to find a shell, to feel it, to understand only on some unspeakable level why it bothered to be so lovely. What joy he found in that, what utter mystery.

Twenty thousand days and nights in one place, each layered and trapped and folded on top of the last, the creases in her hands, the aches between her vertebrae. Embryo, seed coat, endosperm: What is a seed if not the purest kind of memory, a link to every generation that has gone before it?

It is the rarest thing...that gets preserved, that does not get erased, broken down, transformed.

Nearly every species that has ever lived has gone extinct, Laurette. No reason to think we humans will be any different!" Dr. Geffard pronounces this almost gleefully and pours wine into his glass, and she imagines his head as a cabinet filled with ten thousand little drawers.

The dead are gone and so their power over the living is only temporary. You lose sleep, you lose appetite, but eventually you fall asleep and eventually you eat - you may hate yourself for it, but the body's demands are incontrovertible. He had always felt guilt about that, that he went on living... p 115

To be a parent and take an occasional day off from being a parent is a special kind of joy—a lightening, a sweetness made sweeter by its impermanence.

He looks across to the fires. He thinks: The universe is full of fuel.

Grandfather said that the ocean was large enough to contain every dream everyone had ever dreamed, but until now he had no comprehension of what that meant.