Quotes from Anthony Doerr

She finds the ribbon she uses as a bookmark, opens the book, and the museum falls away.

The straining of dreams against the fabric of reality. Growing up meant burying possibilities, one after another.

A travel website says that there are 280 fountains in Rome, but it seems as if there are more:...Remove them and there is no present tense, no circulatory system, nor dreams to balance the waking hours. No Rome.

Hadn't the actors acted of their own volition?

Frau Elena, does a bee know it's going to die if it stings somebody?

His mind, while he works, is almost quiet, almost calm. This is an act of memory.

Men cluster to me like moths around a flame, and if their wings burn, I know I'm not to blame.

to write a story is to inch backward and forward along a series of planks you are cantilevering out into the darkness, plank by plank, inch by inch, and the best you can hope is that each day you find yourself a little bit farther out over the abyss.

Von Rumpel laughs. He appreciates that they are trying to play the game. But don't they understand that the winner has already been determined? He

In the infinite permutation of an ice crystal, everything repeats itself, but, really, from another point of view, nothing repeats itself.

sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden

Marie-Laure hears Madame Manec: You must never stop believing.

A corner of the night sky, beyond a wall of trees, blooms red. In the lurid, flickering light, he sees that the airplane was not alone, that the sky teems with them, a dozen swooping back and forth, racing in all directions, and in a moment of disorientation, he feels that he's looking not up but down, as though a spotlight has been shined into a wedge of bloodshot water, and the sky has become the sea, and the airplanes are hungry fish, harrying their prey in the dark.

Now the piano makes a long, familiar run, the pianist playing different scales with each hand--what sounds like three hands, four--the harmonies like steadily thickening peals on a strand, and Werner sees six-year-old Jutta lean toward him, Frau Elena kneading bread in the background, a crystal radio in his lap, the cords of his soul not yet severed.

Maybe...a person can experience an illness as a kind of health. Maybe not every disease is a deficit, a taking away. Maybe what's happening to her is an opening, a window, a migration.

Nearly every species that has ever lived has gone extinct, Laurette. No reason to think we humans will be any different!

Clair de Lune," a song that makes her think of leaves fluttering, and of the hard ribbons of sand beneath her feet at low tide.

We serve the Reich, Pfennig. It does not serve us.

I think about how Grandpa Z says the sky is blue because it's dusty and octopuses can unscrew the tops off jars and starfish have eyes at the tips of their arms. I think: No matter what happens, no matter how wretched and gloomy everything can get, at least Mrs. Sabo got to feel this.

Always at the end they sit side by side again and pound the cushions, and slowly the room rematerializes around them. "Ah," he says, more quietly, his accent fading, the faintest touch of dread returning to his voice, "here we are. Home.

Part fairy tale, part fool's errand, part science-fiction, part utopian satire, Photios's epitome suggests it could have been one of the more fascinating of the ancient novels.

Who will lie on her back and let her last breath curl up to the ceiling as a curse upon the invaders.

We used to pick berries by the Ruhr. My sister and me.

How can one country make another change its clocks? What if everybody refuses?" "Then a lot of people will be early. Or late.