Quotes from Anthony Doerr

We only get 60 years, if we're really lucky, as adults on earth, and why not try to wake up every day and learn something and talk to people?

Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.

I'm terrified of cliches.

I always told my dad I'd play professional football.

I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff.

Travel definitely affects me as a writer.

She walks like a ballerina in dance slippers, her feet as articulate as hands, a little vessel of grace moving out into the fog.

To men like that, time was a surfeit, a barrel they watched slowly drain. When really, he thinks, it's a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop.

The way her fingers flutter through the space around her. Each a thing he hopes never to forget.

But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.

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.

To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.

This, she realizes, is the basis of all fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark.

Sometimes the eye of a hurricane is the safest place to be.

Each morning comes along 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.

I am only alive because I have not yet died.

Do you know what happens, Etienne," says Madame Manec from the other side of the kitchen, "when you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water?" "You will tell us, I am sure." "It jumps out. But do you know what happens when you put the frog in a pot of cool water and then slowly bring it to a boil? You know what happens then?" Marie-Laure waits. The potatoes steam. Madame Manec says, "The frog cooks.

Doing nothing is as good as collaborating.

Radio: it ties a million ears to a single mouth.

He sweeps her hair back from her ears; he swings her above his head. He says she is his émerveillement. He says he will never leave her, not in a million years.

And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough?

War is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity: chocolate or bullets or parachute silk.

To really touch something, she is learning—the bark of a sycamore tree in the gardens; a pinned stag beetle in the Department of Etymology; the exquisitely polished interior of a scallop shell in Dr. Geffard's workshop—is to love it.

Memories cartwheel out of her head & tumble across the floor.