Quotes from Anthony Doerr

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.

But what Marie-Laure remembered, standing at the rail as it whistled past, was her father saying that Foucault's pendulum would never stop. It would keep swinging, she understood, after she and her father left the Pantheon, after she had fallen asleep that night. After she had forgotten about it, and lived her entire life, and died.

he thinks [...] as though his love for his daughter will outstrip the limits of his body. The walls could fall away, even the whole city, and the brightness of that feeling would not wane.

She does not want to be one of those middle-aged women who thinks of nothing but her own painful history.

Expand your property, increase your wealth, enlarge your walls. And when each new treasure you drag inside your walls doesn't relieve your pain? Go get some more.

stirs the fire below them with a steel pole; a

She thinks: They just say words, and what are words but sounds these men shape out of breath, weightless vapors they send into the air of the kitchen to dissipate and die.

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.

When they were first married and Albert went away on trips for work, Jutta would wake in the predawn hours and remember those first nights after Werner left for Schulpforta and feel all over again the searing pain of his absence.

Even the heart, which in higher animals, when agitated, pulsates with increased energy, in the snail under similar excitement, throbs with a slower motion.

Someone -- likely madame -- opens a window, and the bright air of the sea washes onto the landing, stirring everything: Etienne's curtains, his papers, his dust, Marie-Laure's longing for her father.

When he last went out, almost twenty-four years ago, he tried to make eye contact, to present what might be considered a normal appearance.

When lightning strikes the sea, why don't all the fish die?

Shrouded in his oxhide cape with snow on his shoulders he looks like a phantom from a woodcutter's song, a monster accustomed to doing terrible things, and though she tells herself that by morning the boy will join her husband on thrones in a garden of bliss, where milk pours from stones and honey runs in streams and winter never comes, the feeling of handing him over is a feeling like handing over one of her lungs.

and she is so afraid to try her French that she goes to bed hungry.

Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.

Hatred, Omeir sees, is contagious, spreading through the ranks like a disease. Already, three weeks into the siege, some of the men fight no longer for God or the sultan or plunder but out of a fearful rage. Kill them all. Get this over with. Sometimes the anger flares inside Omeir too, and he wants nothing more than for God to plunge a fiery fist through the sky, and start crushing buildings one after the next until all the Greeks are dead, and he can go home.

Mutti, what goes around the world but stays in a corner?" "I don't know, Max." "A postage stamp.

the America name came from a pickle seller guy who got famous because he lied about doing sex with natives)

Don't you ever get tired of believing, Madame? Don't you ever want proof?" Madame Manec rests a hand on Marie-Laure's forehead. The thick hand that first reminded her of a gardener's or a geologist's. "You must never stop believing. That's the most important thing.

Logic. The principles of validity. Every lock has its key.

So many words! It would take seven lifetimes to learn them all.

A portrait of the führer glowers over every classroom.

Water droplets shine in his eyelashes. Dusk seeps down through the overcast and a slight chill drops into the air and one by one families leave to walk or bike or ride the bus home.