Quotes from Anthony Doerr

If your same blood doesn't run in the arms and legs of the person you're next to, you can't trust anything.

Why would he leave when what he seeks is here?

Frederick can walk for hours in the woods, can identify warblers fifty yards away simply by hearing their song. Frederick hardly every thinks of himself. Frederick is stronger than he is in every imaginable way.

How do you ever know that you are doing the right thing?

too. Who knows when the water will go out again. Her fingers travel back to the cathedral

Joy is not a strong enough word.

total entropy of any system, said Dr. Hauptmann, will decrease only if the entropy of another system will increase. Nature demands symmetry.

Fog on the sea, fog in the streets, fog in the mind.

her shoes. The world seems to sway gently back and forth, as though the town is drifting lightly away. As though back onshore, all of France is left to bite its fingernails and flee and stumble and weep and wake to a numb, gray dawn, unable to believe what is happening. Who do the roads

When I dream, I dream I am in the museum.

Every morning he ties his shoes, packs newspaper inside his coat as insulation against the cold, and begins interrogating the world.

They lie on their stomachs and page through comics, feeling the pleasure of being outside of school, glancing at each other now and then as if curious to learn whether their friendship will continue to exist in another place.

What mazes there are in this world. The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father re-created in his models. Mazes in the nodules on murex shells and in the textures of sycamore bark and inside the hollow bones of eagles. None more complicated than the human brain, Etienne would say, what may be the most complex object in existence; one wet kilogram within which spin universes.

Thank in your heart the brave soul who carries this letter away from me and on its way to you.

Werner can feel the fever flickering inside him, a stove with

What was this hunger that drove me to seek more than what I already had?

It is not so fun being asked how tall you are all the time.

In the days following, he can hardly manage to comb his hair or convince his fingers to button his coat. His mind plays tricks, too: he walks into a room and forgets why he's there. He stares at a superior and forgets what the man just said.

The only sound is the patter of the rain turning Saint-Malo into mud.

He knows the transmitter must be high in the house. Close to the shelling. He says, "I saved her only to hear her die.

he wonders at the mystery of how one god can manage the thoughts and terrors of so many.

She promises Etienne she will remember her age, not try to be everything to everyone, not fight the war by herself.

Maybe he needs only to hear a flicker of hope.

The locusts have no king, yet all of them go out in ranks.