Quotes from Anthony Doerr

I think of you all the time, the veins in your throat, the fuzz on your arms, your eyes, your mouth. I loved you then, I love you now.

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

weaker moments, he

He waits until dark. Marie-Laure sits in the mouth of the wardrobe, the false back open, and listens to her uncle switch on the microphone and the transmitter in the attic. His mild voice speaks numbers into the garret. Then music plays, soft and low, full of cellos tonight . . .

suave y con acento. «Niños, el cerebro está envuelto por una oscuridad total —dice la voz—. Flota en un líquido transparente en el interior del cráneo y jamás recibe luz. Pero a pesar de eso el mundo que construye en nuestra mente está lleno de luz, rebosante de colores y de movimiento. ¿Cómo puede ser que el cerebro, que jamás conoce una chispa de luz, construya en nuestro interior un

granite headland, drawing ever closer, looks like an unholy tooth, something black and dangerous

Every rumor carries a seed of truth.

Sometimes, in the darkness, Werner thinks the cellar may have its own faint light, perhaps emanating from the rubble, the space going a bit redder as the August day above them progresses toward dusk. After a while, he is learning, even total darkness is not quite darkness; more than once he thinks he can see his spread fingers when he passes them in front of his eyes.

The universe is full of fuel.

You think that's going to exonerate you?

Owls have three eyelids. Their eyeballs are not spheres but elongated tubes. A group of owls is called a parliament.

The hallowed Hodegetria has failed; the Mother of God has forsaken them; the beast of the apocalypse rises from the sea. The Antichrist scratches at the gate. Time is a circle, Licinius used to say, and every circle eventually must close.

Volkheimer is gone; there are stories that he has become a fearsome sergeant in the Wehrmacht. That he led a platoon into the last town on the road to Moscow. Hacked off the fingers of dead Russians and smoked them in a pipe.

He was failing at everything important. A room away his daughter was sitting with her face in her hands and he could not go to her.

Seymour has locked: he can no longer see the planet as anything but dying, and everyone around him complicit in the killing. The people in the Eden's Gate houses fill their trash cans and pilot SUVs between their two homes and play music on Bluetooth speakers in their backyards and tell themselves they're good people, conducting honorable, decent lives, living the so-called dream—as though America

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

And yet by early autumn, once or twice a week, at certain moments of the day, sitting out in the Jardin des Plantes beneath the massive hedges or reading beside her father's workbench, Marie-Laure looks up from her book and believes she can smell gasoline under the wind. As if a great river of machinery is steaming slowly, irrevocably, toward her.

The quiet is fretful, unnatural.

Sie denkt: Sie sagen einfach nur Worte und was sind Worte anderes als Geräusche, die diese Männer aus Atem formen, gewichtslose Dämpfe, die sie in die Küchenluft schicken, wo sie sich auflösen und sterben.

Gulls pass, braying like donkeys, and in the distance the guns thud again, and the rattling of the truck fades, and Marie-Laure tries to concentrate on rereading a chapter earlier in the novel: make the raised dots form letters, the letters words, the words a world.

He found himself thinking of water, how it is never still, how even in our bodies water never relents: ceaselessly vibrating, each electron in each molecule in each cell orbiting, spinning, nine independent vectors of position and force, a rapture of movement.

I didn't belong here, high on a crag, among rocks and thorns; I belonged high in the blue, sailing through the clouds, heading to the city where there is no baking sun nor icy wind, where the zephyrs nourish every flower and the hills are always clad in green and no one wants for anything. What a fool I was. What was this hunger that drove me to seek more than what I already had?

Malouins send up oaths: Lord God safeguard this

Well, Fredde has all the best there at that school, all the