Quotes from Anthony Doerr

They're in an empty lot. The sky is jewel blue and cloudless. Huge white stones lie among weeds like the lost molars of giants.

with a prodigious curiosity but little perseverance.

Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air.

You must never stop believing. That's the most important thing.

We all grew up before we we're grown up.

Especially during wartime, such things remain important. They are what separate the civilized man from the barbarian.

clinging to a dream he does not want to leave.

Where did the boy fit? He made such a faint presence. It was like being in the room with a feather. But his soul glowed with some fundamental kindness, didn't it?

raised dots form letters, the letters words, the words a world.

The city seems utterly still, as though everyone is listening, waiting for someone to slip.

The fires pool and strut; they flow up the sides of the ramparts like tides; they splash into alleys, over rooftops, through a carpark. Smoke chases dust; ash chases smoke. A newsstand floats, burning.

vitrine. Upstairs his wife runs a vacuum cleaner; he can

And the tale I have to tell is so ludicrous, so incredible, that you'll never believe a word of it, and yet' – she taps the end of his nose – 'it's true.

Antiquity was invented to be the bread of librarians and schoolmasters.

There there is music, almost always music.

Beneath her fingernails, the frost makes billions of tiny diadems and coronas on the slats of the bench, a lattice of dumbfounding complexity.

Four or five or six or a million heartbeats roll by.

As if every living thing rushes to establish a foothold before some cataclysm arrives.

Don't be so quick to dismiss yourself," he says. "Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.

Bernd molders in the corner. Jutta moves through the world somewhere, watching shadows disentangle themselves from night, watching minders limp past in the dawnn. It was enough when Werner was a boy, wasn't it? A world of wildflowers blooming up through the shapes of rusty cast-off parts. A world of berries and carrot peels ad Frau Elena's fairy tales. Of the sharp smell of tar, and trains passing, and a voice on the radio offering a loom on which to spin his dreams.

Right now the shadows of clouds are dragging across it, and patches of sunlight are touching down everywhere.

But this was just a story they told to comfort themselves.

Nearly every species that has ever lived has gone extinct

Parachuting through the air around him, blown out of the firs, are hundreds of pine needles bundled in twos. He catches one, imagines it as a little man with a truncated torso and long slender legs. The NeedleMan ventures across the clearing on his pointy feet.