Quotes from Anthony Doerr

And in our tale of Noah and the ship of books, can you guess what is the flood?" She shakes her head. "Time. Day after day, year after year, time wipes the old books from the world. The manuscript you brought us before? That was written by Aelian, a learned man who lived at the time of the Caesars. For it to reach us in this room, in this hour, the lines within it had to survive a dozen centuries. A scribe had to copy it, and a second

a world warmer by two degrees centigrade, 150 million more people—most of them poor—will die from air pollution alone. Not violence, not floods, just inferior air.

There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing. That's how it feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing her hair: 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.

Life can turn out a million ways. - Pg. 82

You always think the barley is more plentiful in another man's field, but it's no better out there, Aethon, I promise you," said the crone. "Bandits wait around every corner to bash your skull and ghouls lurk in the shadows, hoping to drink your blood. Here you have cheese, wine, your friends, and your flock. What you already have is better than what you so desperately seek.

Every second of every day has its own magic. - Pg. 163-4

every second is a second lost.

The things that look fixed in the world, child - mountains, wealth, empires - their permanence is only an illusion. We believe they will last, but that is only because of the brevity of our own lives.

It feels appropriate somehow, to have reached the edge of the continent, to have only the hammered sea left in front of him. As though this is the end point Werner has been moving toward ever since he left Zollverein.

The lost Greek tale Cloud Cuckoo Land, by the writer Antonius Diogenes, relating a shepherd's journey to a city in the sky, was probably written around the end of the first century C.E.

They always seem to be going somewhere and never doubt that it is the right place to be going.

Out in the forsaken city, every other structure, it seems, is burning or collapsing, but here in front of him is the inverse in miniature: the city remains, but the house he occupies is gone.

So really, children, mathematically, all the light is invisible

As if, inside Werner's head, an infinitesimal orchestra has stirred to life.

La lógica, la razón y la ciencia pura son las tres vías apropiadas, insiste Aronnax, para aproximarse al misterio.

You know how diamond—show all crystals—grow, Laurette? By adding microscopic layers, a few thousand atoms every month, each atop the next. Millennia after millennia. That's how stories accumulate too. All the old stones accumulate stories.

You needn't have it memorized, dear. That's what the library is for.

Between 365 million and one billion birds die just from crashing into windows in the United States each year.

each day working more frenetically than the last, as if against some deadline known only to him.

He has trained himself not to sleep; he is leading teams of surveyors outside the city walls; his soldiers at the Throat Cutter have launched

plains, I wondered about my friends, and my little bed, and the ewes I'd left behind in the field. I had traveled so far, and it was all so magnificent, yet… … still a needle of doubt pricked beneath my wing. A dark restlessness flickered within…

But I am letting myself be carried away by reveries which I must now put aside, writes Aronnax. Enough of these phantasies.

There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing. That's how it feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing her hair: as though his love for his daughter will outstrip the limits of his body.

Too little fear and you don't pay enough attention; too much and you freeze.