Quotes from Anthony Doerr

Because if it's told well enough, for as long as the story lasts, you get to slip the trap.

Prosperity depends on ferocity. The only thing that keeps your precious grandmothers in their tea and cookies are the fists at the end of your arms.

The air swarms with so much that is invisible!

They said it's for boys. Or very adventurous girls." She can hear him smiling.

How can one country make another change its clocks? What if everybody refuses?

Hertz's theories are interesting but what he loves most is building things, working with his hands, connecting his fingers to the engine of his mind.

An onion-breathed technician in a lab coat measures the distance between Werner's temples, the circumference of his head, and the thickness and shape of his lips. Calipers are used to evaluate his feet, the length of his fingers, and the distance between his eyes and his navel. They measure his penis. The angle of his nose is quantified with a wooden protractor.

everything shipshape

Somwhere across town she was standing at a sink or walking into a closet, his name stowed somewhere in the pleated neurons of her brain, echoing up one dendrite in a billion: David, David.

We live in exciting times, says the radio. We make no complaints. We will plant our feet firmly in our earth, and no attack will move us.

Beneath his feet the snail kept on, feeling its way forward, dragging the house of its shell, fitting its body to the sand, to the private unlit horizons that whorled all around it.

Doors soar away from their frames. Bricks transmute into powder. Great distending clouds of chalk and earth and granite spout into the sky. All twelve bombers have already turned and climbed and realigned above the Channel before roof slates blown into the air finish falling into the streets.

Frederick blinks several times. As he often does when addressed in class, waiting for his internal life to catch up with his external one.

And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That great shuttles of souls might fly about faded but audible if you listen closely enough?

There is great pleasure in being out in the city before the sun is up, streetlights glowing, the hum of a Parisian day commencing.

That's what the gods do they spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come.

Consider a single piece glowing in your family's stove. See it, children? That chunk of coal was once a green plant, a fern or reed that lived one million years ago, or maybe two million, or maybe one hundred million . . .

How does a plague start inside a sealed disc that has had no contact with any other living thing for almost six and a half decades?

The others in my cell are mostly kind. Some tell jokes. Here's one: Have you heard about the Wehrmacht exercise program? Yes, each morning you raise your hands above your head and leave them there!

See obstacles as opportunities. See obstacles as inspirations.

Do we have our heads in the sand, Madame? Or do they?" "Maybe everyone does

The years passed as clouds do, ephemeral and vaporous, condensing, sliding along awhile, then dispersing like ghosts.

Ele a fez o brilhante centro da vida dele; ele a fez sentir como se cada passo que ela dava fosse importante.

Marie-Laure imagines the electromagnetic waves traveling into and out of Michel's machine, bending around them, just as Etienne used to describe, except now a thousand times more crisscross the air than when he lived-maybe a million times more. …And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths?...That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough.