Quotes from Anthony Doerr

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

I am quite gifted at waiting.

Open your eyes, and see what you can see with them before they close forever

This look?" Bastian says, and flourishes his fat hand. "The way he's got nothing left? A German soldier never reaches this point. There's a name for this look. It's

Como chamamos a luz visível? Chamamos de cor. Mas o espectro eletromagnético corre ao zero em uma direção e ao infinito na outra, então, na verdade, crianças, matematicamente, toda luz é invisível.

Don't you want to be alive before you die?

Jean Jacques Rousseau, in a green-spined hardcover that's right over there, one shelf away, JC179.R, said: You are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to nobody!

This look?" Bastian says, and flourishes his fat hand. "The way he's got nothing left? A German soldier never reaches this point. There's a name for this look. It's called 'circling the drain.'

Then it resumes, the twin wands of its horns extending, dragging its whorled shell atop the sled of its body. What do you seek, little snail? Do you live only in this one moment, or do you worry like Professor Aronnax for your future?

The apartment is sleek and shiny, full of deep carpets that swallow noise.

All her life she has been told to believe, tried to believe, wanted to believe, that if a person suffers long enough, works hard enough, then she—like Ulysses washing up on the shore of the kingdom of brave Alcinous—will ultimately reach a better place. That through suffering we are redeemed. That by dying we live again. And maybe in the end that's the easier thing.

It is my one great skill. I was never much good at athletics or mathematics, but even as a boy, I possessed unnatural patience. I would wait with my mother while she got her hair styled. I would sit in the chair and wait for hours, no magazine, no toys, not even swinging my legs back and forth. All the mothers were very impressed.

The last of autumn's leaves spiraling to earth.

We are a volley of bullets, we are cannonballs. We are the tip of the sword.

Go," says Volkheimer again. Werner looks at him a last time: his torn jacket and shovel jaw. The tenderness of his big hands. What you could be.

That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.

The more sentimental, the better.

Claude understands that he ought to resent them, but he admires their competence and manners, the clean efficiency with which they move. They always seem to be going somewhere and never doubt that it is the right place to be going. Something his own country has lacked.

Membership in the State Youth becomes mandatory. The boys in Werner's Kameradschaften are taught parade maneuvers and quizzed on fitness standards and required to run sixty meters in twelve seconds. Everything is glory and country and competition and sacrifice. Live faithfully, the boys sing as they troop past the edges of the colony. Fight bravely and die laughing.

Swifts, flushed from chimneys, catch fire and swoop like blown sparks out over the ramparts and extinguish themselves in the sea.

The echoes of his footfalls ricochet off tall houses and rain back onto them, and he labors beneath her weight, and she is old enough to suspect that what he presents as quaint and welcoming might in truth be harrowing and strange.

Hers is a low voice, full of pebbles—a sailor's voice or a smoker's.

His longing is such that Rex's absence becomes something like a presence, a scalpel left behind in his gut.

wouldn't even insult my mattress by giving it a