Quotes from Anthony Doerr

Para aquellos hombres el tiempo era un exceso, un barril que se vaciaba lentamente. Cuando en realidad, piensa él, se parece más a un charco luminoso que uno lleva entre las manos y debe proteger con toda su energía, luchar para no derramar ni una sola gota".

Everybody, he is learning, likes to hear themselves talk. Hubris, like the oldest stories. They raise the antenna too high, broadcast for too many minutes, assume the world offers safety and rationality when of course it does not.

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

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

This is a double cruelty: that everything else keeps living, that the spinning earth does not pause for even an instant in its trip around the sun.

A week ago, it all seemed so secure. So settled.

she'd left, feeling the emptiness of the big theater

He scans the field. Trees, sky, hay. Darkness falling like velvet. Already a few pale stars. Marie-Laure breathes the measured breath of sleep. Everyone should behave as if he carries the real thing. The locksmith reties the stone inside the bag and slips it back into his rucksack. He can feel its tiny weight there, as though he has slipped it inside his own mind: a knot.

Good with tools," Herr Siedler is saying. "Smart beyond your years. There are places for a boy like you. General Heissmeyer's schools. Best of the best. Teach the mechanical sciences too. Code breaking, rocket propulsion, all the latest.

Only through the harshest tests can God's chosen rise.

Each time Marie-Laure relays another rumor to her father, he repeats "Germany" with a question mark after it, as if saying it for the very first time. He says the takeover of Austria is nothing to worry about. He says everyone remembers the last war, and no one is mad enough to go through that again.

I hear they give out poisoned chocolate.

Right three degrees, repeat range. Calm, weary voices directing fire. The same sort of voice God uses, perhaps, when He calls souls to Him. This way, please.

She turns her face toward his, and though she cannot see him, he feels he cannot bear her gaze. "Won't you come with me?

Maybe his body is giving up. If he does not eat, he understands, he will die. But when he does eat, he fells as if he will die.

That first peach slithers down his throat like rapture. A sunrise in his mouth.

It's a long story. Do you want to hear a long story?

When the wind is blowing, which it almost always is, with the walls groaning and the shutters banging, the rooms overloaded and the staircase wound tightly up through its center, the house seems the material equivalent of her uncle's inner being: apprehensive, isolated, but full of cobwebby wonders.

For Winkler each hour was another hour between Cleveland and Anchorage, between who they were becoming and who they had been.

Then the short man disappears through the huge doors. Minutes later, the aide-de-camp flings open the shutters of an upstairs window and gazes a moment across the rooftops before unfurling a crimson flag over the brick and securing its eyelets to the sill.

Home of mice and damp and the stink of stranded shellfish, as if a huge tide swept in decades ago and took its time draining away. Marie-Laure hesitates over the open door, smelling the fires from outside and the clammy, almost opposite smell washing up from the bottom.

Toutes ces fenêtres dans le noir... C'est comme si la ville était devenue une bibliothèque de livres écrits dans une langue inconnue : et les maisons, des rayonnages de volumes devenus illisibles en l'absence de lumière. Mais il y a cette machine au grenier, qui fonctionne de nouveau. Une étincelle dans la nuit.

I heard that the diamond is like a piece of light from the original world. Before it fell. A piece of light rained to earth from God.

Wherever her great-uncle is, could he have survived this? Could anyone? Has she?