Quotes from Anthony Doerr

How does life get to be like this? Where she wears her sister's castoff underlinen and a thrice-patched dress while men like Kalaphates go about in silk and velvet with servants trotting behind? While foreigners like these have basins of milk and courtyards of geese and a different coat for every feast day? She feels a scream building inside her, a shriek to shatter glass.

It was love. He excavated a boot print she'd left on the snowy step outside his apartment and preserved it in his freezer.

Marie-Laure sits among them, wondering who will cave, who will tattle, who will be the bravest. Who will lie on her back and let her last breath curl up to the ceiling as a curse upon the invaders.

That Dr. Hauptmann might have ties so far up—that the telephone on his desk connects him with men a hundred miles away who could probably wag a finger and send a dozen Messerschmitts streaming up from an airfield to strafe some city—intoxicates Werner. We live in exceptional times.

The moonlight shines and billows; the broken clouds scud above the trees. Leaves fly everywhere. But the moonlight stays unmoved by the wind, passing through clouds, through air, in what seems to Werner like impossibly slow imperturbable rays. They hang across the buckling grass. Why doesn't the wind move the light?

These were the beginnings of a new existence; Winkler could feel it gestating.

It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio. —Joseph Goebbels

Nature demands symmetry.

Who had he been? A failed father, a runaway husband. A son. A packet of unopened letters. He was dead; he was dead.

His thoughts skirted Sandy and especially Grace as if they were fatal chasms into which he might tumble.

In the dormitory window one night, Frederick rest his forehead against the glass. "I hate them. I hate them for that.

You have to trust someone sometime.

You and I will never reach Beta Oph2, dear, and that is a painful truth. But in time you will come to believe that there is nobility in being a part of an enterprise that will outlast you.

Silence is the fruit of occupation.

One step behind her, her father tilts his head up and gives the sky a huge smile. Marie-Laure knows this even though her back is to him, even though he says nothing, even though she is blind - Papa's thick wet hair is wet from the snow and standing in a dozen angles off his head, and his scarf is draped asymmetrically over his shoulders, and he's beaming up at the falling snow (41).

To know her is to realize the thousand forms of inquiry.

Werner sleeps in a tiny dormitory with seven other fourteen-year-olds. The bunk above belongs to Frederick: a reedy boy, thin as a blade of grass, skin as pale as cream. Frederick is new too. He's from Berlin. His father is assistant to an ambassador. When Frederick speaks, his attention floats up, as though he's scanning the sky for something.

Gates were creaking open inside him - paths, long sealed off, revealed themselves once more.

But that bird can fly to Africa and back. Powered by bugs and worms and desire.

Is it dawn? She climbs the ladder and presses her ear to the trapdoor. No more sirens. Maybe the house burned

Aethon," says Olivia. "The fool you were telling us about. In the story? Even though he keeps going the wrong way, keeps getting turned into the wrong thing, he never gives up. He survives." Zeno looks at her, some new understanding seeping into his consciousness.

A real diamond, his father used to say, is never entirely free of inclusions. A real diamond is never perfect.

he could feel his hope wilting.

Isn't doing nothing a kind of troublemaking?" "Doing nothing is doing nothing." "Doing nothing is as good as collaborating.