Quotes from Anthony Doerr

All day Marie-Laure lies on her stomach and reads. Logic, reason, pure science: these, Aronnax insists, are the proper ways to pursue a mystery. Not fables and fairy tales.

The bookseller said it's in two parts, and this is the first. I thought that next year, if we keep saving, we can get the second—

your father is in town trying the telegraph office, though I assured him that'll be as profitable as trying to pick feathers out of molasses.

Doesn't look like much, does he?" murmurs Frederick. "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." The wagtail hops from twig to twig. Werner rubs his aching eyes. It's just a bird. "Ten thousand years ago," whispers Frederick, "they came through here in the millions. When this place was a garden, one endless garden from end to end.

As I work on yet another draft of my story, I try to remember these lessons. A journal entry is for its writer; it helps its writer refine, perceive, and process the world. But a story—a finished piece of writing—is for its reader; it should help its reader refine, perceive, and process the world—the one particular world of the story, which

It's 1940 and no one laughs at the Hitler Youth now.

The entropy of a closed system never decreases.

She wants very badly for her father to say, Yes, that's it absolutely, ma chérie, but he says nothing.

Water was a wild, capricious substance: nothing solid, nothing permanent, nothing as it appeared.

Now it is as if she can hear the pendulum in the air in front of her: that huge golden bob, as wide across as a barrel, swinging on and on, never stopping. Grooving and regrooving its inhuman truth into the floor.

Every small, concurrent event had slowed down and assumed an excruciating clarity.

Imogene has twenty-two birdfeeders, some pole-mounted, some suspended from eaves, platform feeders and globe feeders, coffee can feeders and feeders that look like little Swiss chalets, and every evening, when she comes home from work, she drags a stepladder from one to the next, toting a bucket of mixed seeds, keeping them full. In

the whisper of space being compressed.

He and Werner eat their first meal in their starchy new uniforms at a long wooden table in the refectory. Some boys talk in whispers, some sit alone, some gulp food as if they have not eaten in days. Through three arched windows, dawn sends a sheaf of hallowed golden rays. Frederick flutters his fingers and asks, "Do you like birds?" "Sure." "Do you know about hooded crows?

Any moment, it seemed, something could tear the sky and whatever was on the other sides would push through.

Her fingers travel back to the cathedral spire. South to the Gate of Dinan. All evening she has been marching her fingers around the model, waiting for her great-uncle Etienne, who owns this house, who went out the previous night while she slept, and who has not returned. And now it is night again, another revolution of the clock, and the whole block is quiet, and she cannot sleep.

the dreams had ceased coming, as they often did, retreating somewhere else for years, until another event of sufficient significance neared, and the patterns of circumstance dragged them to the surface again.

The vice minister sets down The Principles of Mechanics and pushes it away, then glances at his palms as though it has made them dirty. He says, "The only place your brother is going, little girl, is into the mines. As soon as he turns fifteen. Same as every other boy in this house.

The director said there would be three decoys. Added to the real diamond, that makes four. One would stay behind at the museum. Three others would be sent in three different directions. One south with a young geologist. Another north with the chief of security. And one is here, in a field west of Versailles, inside the tool case of Daniel LeBlanc, principal locksmith for the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle. Three

Abram os olhos e vejam o máximo que puderem antes que eles se fechem para sempre.

The star-flooded nights, the dew-soaked dawns, the hushed ambulatories, the enforced asceticism—never has Werner felt part of something so single-minded.

Boats motor back and forth, unzipping the water.

The future waited for him to keep his appointment.

Here was the worst curse: he managed to force the dream from his conscious mind often enough that when it returned to him (opening the pantry door, say, recalling the sweep of floodwater), the experience of it became fresh and bleeding once more.