Quotes from Anthony Doerr

He says, "This hotel is very cheap, ma cherie. The innkeeper behind the desk said our room was forty francs a night but only twenty francs if we made our own bed." He listens to her breathe. "So I said, 'Oh, we can make our own bed.' And he said, 'Right, I'll get you some nails and wood.'" Marie-Laure still does not smile.

She takes no notice of him; she seems to know nothing but the morning.

Each story Werner hears contains its own flaws and contradictions, as though the truth is a machine whose gears are not meshing.

Even if you don't believe in it, I do. Otherwise what's it all been for?

and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes.

If only she had brought her novel down with her.

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.

We're in Borneo, can't you tell? We're skimming the treetops now, big leaves are glimmering below us, and there are coffee bushes over there, smell them?" and 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 Borneo, she does not want to decide.

Ojalá la vida fuera como una novela de Julio Verne y uno pudiera pasar las páginas cuando lo necesita para saber lo que va a suceder más adelante.

They cross the Channel at midnight. There are twelve and they are named for songs: Stardust and Stormy Weather and In the Mood and Pistol-Packin' Mama. The sea glides along far below, spattered with the countless chevrons of whitecaps. Soon enough, the navigators can discern the low moonlit lumps of islands ranged along the horizon.

This is not real suffering, she tells herself. this is only a matter of reprogramming her picture of the future. Of understanding that the line of descendancy is not continuous but arbitrary.

On Earth, when I was a boy, most everybody got sick. Rashes, funny little fevers. All the unmodified people got sick every now and then. It's part of being human.

One in the morning," Bunny says, "and one at night. Sometimes, kid, we all need a little help shoveling the shit.

What ways? Whom have you put your trust in?" "You have to trust someone sometime." "If your same blood doesn't run in the arms and legs of the person you're next to, you can't trust anything. And even then. It's not a person you wish to fight, Madame, it's a system. How do you fight a system?" "You try.

Flowers grow on her tiny wrought-iron balcony, and in summer she can estimate what time of day it is by feeling how wide the petals of the evening primroses have opened.

Where did the boy fit? He made such a faint presence. It was like being in the room with a feather.

It's like reaching into a sack full of cotton and finding a razor blade inside, everything constant and undeviating and then that one dangerous thing, so sharp you can hardly feel it open your skin.

Max looks up from his book and says, "Mutti, what goes around the world but stays in a corner?" "I don't know, Max." "A postage stamp.

At dusk they pour from the sky. They blow across the ramparts, turn cartwheels over rooftops, flutter into the ravines between houses. Entire streets swirl with them, flashing white against the cobbles. Urgent message to the inhabitants of this town, they say. Depart immediately to open country.

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. All the old stones accumulate stories. That little rock you're so curious about may have seen Alaric sack Rome; it may have glittered in the eyes of Pharaohs. Scythian queens might have danced all night wearing it. Wars might have been fought over it.

String and spit and wire and a voice on the radio offering a loom on which to spin his dreams.

Slowly, gratefully, the world settles. 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.

To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness.

It was wrong and impossible and illicit and yet each minute with the boy was a gift, a scene from a story he could not leave.