Quotes from Anthony Doerr

It seems to Werner that the space 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. He thinks of the girl who may or may not be in the city behind him.

De entre todas las cosas que he visto en la vida, creo que el mar es mi favorita. A veces me descubro mirándolo y me olvido completamente de mis obligaciones. Es lo bastante grande como para contener en su interior todas las cosas que un hombre puede sentir a lo largo de toda una vida.

She opens the door to her grandfather's bedroom and stops. Below her, the man pauses again. Has he heard her? Is he climbing more quietly? Out in the world waits a multitude of sanctuaries—gardens full of bright green wind; kingdoms of hedges; deep pools of forest shade through which butterflies float thinking only of nectar. She can get to none of them.

To a certain extent, time was malleable, what he did did matter. Grace was proof of that. Naaliyah was alive.

A dozen pigeons roosting on the cathedral spire cataract down its length and wheel out over the sea.

Together, the unlikeliest of penitents, silently, grafting words to air, they sent their prayers into the room.

Warner laces his boots and sings the songs and marches the marches, acting less out of duty than out of a time worn desire to be dutiful.

Werner and his younger sister, Jutta, are raised at Children's House, a clinker-brick two-story orphanage on Viktoriastrasse whose rooms are populated with the coughs of sick children and the crying of newborns and battered trunks inside which drowse the last possessions of deceased parents: patchwork dresses, tarnished wedding cutlery, faded ambrotypes of fathers swallowed by the mines.

March, rain at the windows, and he had to be up at five the next morning. He listened to the click and patter of drops against the panes.

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.

Life: it's happening beyond the mills, beyond the gates. Out there people chase questions of great importance.

We return to the places we're from; we trample faded corners and pencil in new lines.

had felt time settle over itself, imbricate and fix into place the vertigo of future aligning with the present.

Lord Our God Your Grace is a purifying fire.

Between them was fifteen or so feet of frozen space, bounded by his window and hers, but it was as if the windows had liquefied, or else the air had, and his vision skewed and rippled and it was all he could do to put the Newport into gear and ease forward to let the next car in.

Fifteen and a half years as incontestable, a continent he'd never visit, a staircase he'd never climb.

Don't you miss the world?" He is quiet; so is she. Both ride spirals of memory. "I have the whole world right here," he says, and taps the cover of Darwin. "And in my radios. Right at my fingertips.

He is a ghost. He is from some other world. He is Papa, Madame Manec, Etienne; he is everyone who has left her finally coming back.

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

He takes her hand to help her over the piles. No shells fall and no rifles crack and the light is soft and shot through with ash. Jutta, he thinks, I finally listened.

to raise one's hopes is to risk their falling further.

that a story is a way of stretching time.

You said that what's so beautiful about a fool is that a fool never knows when to give up.

He lingers over images of Marie-Laure—her hands, her hair—even as he worries that to concentrate on them too long is to risk wearing them out.