Quotes from Anthony Doerr

No footprints in the sand. Pebbles and bits of weed are strung in scalloped lines. Three outer islands bear low stone forts; a green lantern glows on the tip of a jetty. It feels appropriate somehow, to have reached the edge of the continent, to have only the hammered sea left in front of him.

You have minds. But minds are not to be trusted. Minds are always drifting toward ambiguity, toward questions, when what you really need is certainty. Purpose. Clarity. Do not trust your minds.

She has no memories of her mother but imagines her as white, a soundless brilliance.

Mostly he misses Jutta: her loyalty, her obstinacy, the way she always seems to recognize what is right. Though in Werner's weaker moments, he resents those same qualities in his sister. Perhaps she's the impurity in him, the static in his signal that the bullies can sense.

Her great-uncle seems kind, curious, and entirely sane. Stillness: this is what he radiates more than anything else. The stillness of a tree. Of a mouse blinking in the dark.

I'm scared, Papa." "Keep hold of me.

Nothing will be healed in this kitchen. Some griefs can never be put right.

Hardly a couple of ounces of feathers and bones. But that bird can fly to Africa and back. Powered by bugs and worms and desire.

Far better, he decides, to keep one's presence small, inconspicuous.

That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much. Only strongest people can turn away from feelings like that.

In the candlelight, she looks of another world, her face all freckles, and in the center of the freckles those two eyes hang unmoving like the egg cases of spiders. They do not track him, but they do not unnerve him, either; they seem almost to see into a separate, deeper place, a world that consists only of music.

The eggs taste like clouds. Like spun gold. […] Marie-Laure can hear a can opening, juice slopping into a bowl. Seconds later, she's eating wedges of wet sunlight.

Mazes in the nodules on murex shells and in the textures of sycamore bark and inside the hollow bones of eagles. None more complicated than the human brain

Every day Patti Goss-Simpson brings four fish sticks to school in her Titan Deep Freeze lunch box and every day at 11:52 a.m., because the cafeteria is being remodeled, Patti puts her terrible fish sticks in the terrible microwave at the back of Mr. Bates's room and presses the terrible beepy buttons and the smell that pours out feels to Seymour like he's being pressed face-first into a swamp.

he realizes that the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.

There are ninety-six thousand kilometers of blood vessels in the human body, children! Almost enough to wind around the earth two and a half times . . .

But minds are not to be trusted. Minds are always drifting toward ambiguity, toward questions, when what you really need is certainty. Purpose. Clarity. Do not trust your minds.

The Goddess of History looked down to earth. Only through the hottest fires can purification be achieved.

I thought they might take a break," he says. Marie-Laure is thinking of her father. "Maybe," she says, "it is even more important now?

DeschideÈ›i ochii È™i vedeÈ›i cu ei tot ce puteÈ›i înainte s? se închid? pe vecie .

He made her the glowing hot center of his life; he made her feel as if every step she took was important.

October is here, and bright cold winds ought to pour off the ocean; leaves ought to tumble down the alleys. But the wind has come and gone. As if deciding it did not like the changes here.

inside her chest pulses something huge, something full of longing, something unafraid.

He translates one book of the Iliad, two of the Odyssey, plus an admirable slice of Plato's Republic. Five lines on an average day, ten on a good one, scribbled onto yellow legal pads in his crimped pencil-writing and stuffed into boxes beneath the dining table. Sometimes he believes his translations are adequate. Usually he decides they're terrible. He shows them to no one.