Quotes from Anthony Doerr

He should have risked more. It has taken him his whole life to accept himself, and he is surprised to understand that now that he can, he does not long for one more year, one more month: eighty-six years has been enough.

she loves to ask them about their lives, to wonder what adventures they've had, what lusts, what secret follies they carry in their hearts.

They want the working classes, laborers. Boys who aren't stamped by"—Herr Siedler frowns—"middle-class garbage. The cinemas and so forth. They want industrious boys. Exceptional boys." "Yes, sir.

What it would be like to spend ten years in this tall narrow house, shuttered from the world, studying its secrets and reading its volumes and looking at this girl.

?????????, parádeisos, paradise: it means garden.

Everyone seems to agree that the world will end soon and the only essential task is to cleanse the besmirchment from one's soul before that day comes.

she is as inescapable as a moon.

The eggs taste like clouds. Like spun gold.

The voice is like something from a long-ago dream.

For as long as we have been a species, whether with medicine or technology, by gathering power, by embarking on journeys, or by telling stories, we humans have tried to defeat death. None of us ever has." They reach the top of the tower

split by the knobs of her vertebrae. She used to fall asleep holding his index finger in her fist. She used to sprawl with her books beneath the key pound bench and move her hands like spiders across the pages. "Am I to stay here?" "With Madame. And Etienne." He hands her a towel and helps her climb onto the tile and waits outside

But curses are not real. Earth is all magma and continental crust and ocean. Gravity and time. Isn't it?

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.

There, thinks Werner when he finds it again, there: a feeling like shutting your eyes and feeling your way down a mile-long thread until your fingernails find the tiny lump of a knot.

K?zlardan birini bugün yüzme havuzundan att?lar. Inge Hanmann'?... Onun gibi bir k?rma ile birlikte yüzmemize izin veremezlermiÅŸ. Temiz deÄŸilmiÅŸ. MelezmiÅŸ, Werner. Biz de öyle deÄŸil miyiz? Biz de yar? annemiz, yar? babam?z deÄŸil miyiz?

He had a love affair with photosynthesis. He could talk about moss for an hour. He said that plants carried wisdom humans would never be around long enough to understand.

Each of these books, child, is a door, a gateway to another place and time. You have your whole life in front of you, and for all of it, you'll have this. It will be enough, don't you think?

He feels only the raw, impassive surge of the moonlight as it strikes the tent above him and scatters.

Everyone should behave as if he carries the real thing. The locksmith reties the stone inside the bag and slips it back into his rucksack.

Does she grieve over his absence? Or has she calcified her feelings, protected herself, as he is learning to do?

Seconds later, she's eating wedges of wet sunlight.

In a child's cursive, beneath the crossed-out lines, Aethon's new line is handwritten in the margin, "The world as it is is enough.

It was enough when Werner was a boy, wasn't it? A world of wildflowers blooming up through the shapes of rusty cast-off parts. A world of berries and carrot peels and Frau Elena's fairy tales. Of the sharp smell of tar, and trains passing, and bees humming in the window boxes. String and spit and wire and a voice on the radio offering a loom on which to spin his dreams.

Grandfather, Omeir thinks, already I have seen things I did not know how to dream.