Quotes from Anthony Doerr

So many human beings, none of them seeing clearly.

The sky a pit of violet, edged with black.

An avalanche descends onto the city. A hurricane. Teacups drift off shelves. Paintings slip off nails. In another quarter second, the sirens are inaudible. Everything is inaudible. The roar becomes loud enough to separate membranes in the middle ear.

Thirty-one years old, and already Naaliyah was more comfortable with insects than people: they were more chemically predictable, more elegantly designed.

Between whatever has happened already and whatever is to come hovers an invisible borderland, the known on one side and the unknown on the other.

It was hard to live through the early 1940s in France and not have the war be the center from which the rest of your life spiraled.

The sky drops silver threads of sleet.

Where did the boy fit? He made such a faint presence. It was like being in a room with a feather. But his soul glowed with some fundamental kindness, didn't it?

The days lengthen and the library roof drips and the big ponderosas standing over the cabin unload snow with great whumps that sound to the boy like Hermes plunging in his golden sandals down from Olympus on another errand from the gods.

Humans are best understood as exterminators, he says. Every habitat we enter, we decimate, and now we have overrun the earth. The next thing we exterminate will be ourselves.

Marie-Laure drops her cane; she begins to cry. Her father lifts her, holds her to his narrow chest. "it's so big," she whispers. "You can do this, Marie." She cannot.

that a thousand choices were implicit in a single moment.

He says she is his émerveillement.

Movies make you think civilization will end fast, like with aliens and explosions, but really it'll end slow. Ours is already ending, it's just ending too slow for people to notice.

his heart laced with regret.

That air of otherworldliness in the snarls of her hair and the fearlessness of her step.

Anna imagines Antonius Diogenes, whoever he was, setting knife to quill, quill to ink, ink to scroll, placing one more barricade in front of Aethon, stretching time for another purpose: to detain his niece in the living world for a little longer.

Werner wonders in the dead of night, isn't life a kind of corruption? A child is born, and the world sets in upon it. Taking things from it, stuffing things into it. Each bite of food, each particle of light entering the eye—the body can never be pure.

All the events of his life were compressing to singularity: one night, one hour.

The other boys crane their necks. Dr. Hauptmann's lips are pink and his eyelids are improbably thin. As though he is watching Werner even when he blinks. He says, "Make them all.

she might hiss. "Who pays the rent?" "I don't know, Monsieur." "Do the checks come from the Natural History Museum?" "I can't say." "When was the last time someone came?" "No one comes. The checks are mailed.

Number 4: the tall, derelict bird's nest of a house owned by her great-uncle Etienne. Where she has lived for four years. Where she kneels on the sixth floor alone, as a dozen American bombers roar toward her.

Hatred, Omeir sees, is contagious, spreading through the ranks like a disease. Already, three weeks into the siege, some of the men fight no longer for God or the sultan or plunder but out of a fearful rage. Kill them all. Get this over with.

How do they know what parts to play, those little bees?