Quotes from Anthony Doerr

There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing.

something so single-minded. Never has he felt such a hunger to belong. In the rows of dormitories are cadets who talk of alpine skiing, of duels, of jazz clubs and governesses and boar hunting; boys who employ curse words with virtuosic skill and boys who talk about cigarettes named for cinema stars; boys who speak of "telephoning the colonel" and boys who have baronesses for mothers.

?????, he wrote, mýthos, a conversation, a tale, a legend from the darkness before the days of Christ. "Some stories," she says, "can be both false and true at the same time.

There are many people in this world," Himerius says, "who do not care to what purposes their engines are put. So long as they are paid.

To the bombardiers, the walled city on its granite headland, drawing ever closer, looks like an unholy tooth, something black and dangerous, a final abscess to be lanced away.

It doesn't hurt, she explains. And there is no darkness, not the kind they imagine. Everything is composed of webs and lattices and upheavals of sound and texture.

But the huge bowl of the sky remains untracked: no zeppelins, no bombers, no superhuman paratroopers, just the last songbirds returning from their winter homes, and the quicksilver winds of spring transmuting into the heavier, greener breezes of summer.

By age seventeen he'd convinced himself that every human he saw was a parasite, captive to the dictates of consumption. But as he reconstructs Zeno's translation, 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.

For portions of every day, she is happy.

What is a seed if not the purest kind of memory, a link to every generation that has gone before it?

The soldiers throw a bag over whomever they want to remove, run electricity through him, and then that person is gone, vanished. Expelled to some other world.

Stick-thin, alabaster-pale Etienne LeBlanc runs down the rue de Dinan with Madame Ruelle, the baker's wife, on his heels: the least-robust rescue ever assembled.

Two women leave, claiming obligations involving grandchildren. Others tug at their blouses and rattle their chairs as though the temperature of the kitchen has gone up. Six remain. 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.

Boil the words you already know down to their bones," Rex says, "and usually you find the ancients sitting there at the bottom of the pot, staring back up." Who says such things? And still Zeno steals glances: Rex's mouth, his hair, his hands; there is the same pleasure in gazing at this man as in gazing at a fire.

Thermal scanners? Laser sights? Above the junipers, a trio of blue lights hover: some kind of remote-controlled drone. These, the creatures we have chosen to repopulate the earth.

The weather in this place: you can feel it between your fingers.

Marie-Laure is glad to hear a smile enter his voice. But beneath it she can sense his thoughts fluttering like trapped birds.

After a while, he is learning, even total darkness is not quite darkness.

Papa says curses are only stories cooked up to deter thieves. He says there are sixty-five million specimens in this place, and if you have the right teacher, each can be as interesting as the last.

You are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to nobody!

Posters go up in the market, on tree trunks in the Place Chateaubriand. Voluntary surrender of firearms. Anyone who does not cooperate will be shot.

Nostos, yes. The act of homecoming, a safe arrival. Of course, mapping a single English word onto a Greek one is almost always slippery. A nostos also means a song about a homecoming.

Waiting is a kind of war. You simply tell yourself that you must not lose.

Don't you miss the world?" He is quiet; so is she. Both ride spirals of memory.