Quotes from Anthony Doerr

All summer the smells of nettles and daisies and rainwater purl through the gardens.

First we die, the woman says. "Then our bodies are buried. So we die two deaths." "Then in another world, folded inside the living world, we wait. We wait until everyone who knew us when we were children has died. And then the last of them dies, we finally die our third death.

Jutta, he thinks, I finally listened.

Where," he asks, "is that book? The one with the birds? In the gold slipcover?

and how could Neumann Two not have known, but of course he didn't, because that is how things are with Neumann Two, with everybody in this unit, in this army, in this world, they do as they're told, they get scared, they move about with only themselves in mind. Name me someone who does not.

The city, thinks Marie-Laure, is slowly being remade into the model upstairs. Streets sucked empty one by one.

But we are the good guys. Aren't we, Uncle?" "I hope so. I hope we are.

It's the absence of all the bodies, she thinks, that allows us to forget. It's that the sod seals them over.

A ghastly creeping terror rises from a place beyond thoughts. Some innermost trapdoor she must leap upon immediately and lean against with all her weight and padlock shut.

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.

In the stories after the war, all the resistance heroes were dashing, sinewy types who could construct machine guns from paperclips. And the Germans either raised their godlike blond heads through open tank hatches to watch broken cities scroll past, or else were psychopathic, sex-crazed torturers of beautiful Jewesses. Where did the boy fit in? He made such a faint presence. It was like being in the room with a feather. But his soul glowed with some fundamental kindness, didn't it?

Knock him on the head with the umbrella stand? Jab him with the paring knife? Scream. Die. Papa.

Marie-Laure will indeed smell something, whether because her uncle is passing coffee grounds beneath her nose, or because they really are flying over the coffee trees of Boreno, she does not want to decide (151).

But seven-year-old Werner seems to float. He is undersized and his ears stick out and he speaks with a high, sweet voice; the whiteness of his hair stops people in their tracks. Snowy, milky, chalky. A color that is the absence of color. Every morning he ties his shoes, packs newspaper inside his coat as insulation against the cold, and begins interrogating the world.

there comes a point where the pressure of relentless fear perforates rationality and the body moves independently of the mind.

Werner is beginning to see, approaching his sixteenth birthday, that what the führer really requires is boys. Great rows of them walking to the conveyor belt to climb on.

They just say words, and what are words but sounds these men shape out of breath, weightless vapors they send into the air of the kitchen to dissipate and die.

Electricity, Werner is learning, can be static by itself. But couple it with magnetism, and suddenly you have movement—waves. Fields and circuits, conduction and induction. Space, time, mass. The air swarms with so much that is invisible! How he wishes he had eyes to see the ultraviolet, eyes to see the infrared, eyes to see radio waves crowding the darkening sky, flashing through the walls of the house.

The things we see are only masks for the things we can't see.

On the rue de la Crosse, the Hotel of Bees becomes almost weightless for a moment, lifted in a spiral of flame, before it begins to rain the pieces back to the earth

leafless trees stand atop slag heaps like skeleton hands shoved up from the underworld.

silent desperation of everything they never said - gaps and absences in every conversation, the past circumscribing the present, the future hemming in the past.

All her life she has been told to believe, tried to believe, wanted to believe, that if a person suffers long enough, works hard enough, then she—like Ulysses washing up on the shore of the kingdom of brave Alcinous—will ultimately reach a better place. That through suffering we are redeemed. That by dying we live again. And maybe in the end that's the easier thing. But Anna is tired of suffering. And she is not ready to die.

You lose sleep, you lose your 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 guilty about that, that he went on living, eating tomato sandwiches, going to Iditarod Days with his father, making snowballs, when his mother could not.