Quotes from Anthony Doerr

Algumas vezes, eu me apanho encarando o mar e me esqueço de minhas tarefas. Parace grande o suficiente para conter qualquer coisa que as pessoas possam sentir.

In much wisdom is much sorrow, and in ignorance is much wisdom."]·

I don't want to make trouble, Madame." "Isn't doing nothing a kind of troublemaking?" "Doing nothing is doing nothing." "Doing nothing is as good as collaborating." The

A single fruit fly in his wine can send a black thread twisting through his mood that lingers for days. Widow Theodora says that Kalaphates needs compassion, that the remedy to every woe is prayer, and after dark Maria kneels in their cell in front of the icon of Saint Koralia, her lips moving silently, sending devotions up past the beams.

On Earth, when I was a boy, most everybody got sick. Rashes, funny little fevers. All the unmodified people got sick every now and then. It's part of being human. We think of viruses as evil but in reality few are. Life usually seeks to cooperate, not fight.

But he didn't have language for what he really wanted to say; he couldn't explain how her wildness that day, on the road, had thrilled him as much as it terrified him.

The) Gray wagtail...doesn't look like much, does he? Hardly a couple of ounces of feathers and bones. But that bird can fly to Africa and back. Powered by bugs and worms and desire.

A moment like this--the four of them around the table under the sad, dusty kitchen lamp--could never accommodate all the things she had to say.

Elena?" She'll laugh. She'll tousle Werner's hair; she'll whisper, "They'll say you're too little, Werner, that you're from nowhere, that you shouldn't dream big. But I believe in you. I think you'll do something great.

December sucks the light from the castle. The sun hardly clears the horizon before sinking away. Snow falls once, twice, then stays locked over the lawns.

He is a man who understands the power of the German soil, who feels its dark prehistoric vigor thudding in his very cells.

In much wisdom is much sorrow, and in ignorance is much wisdom.

Everyone should behave as if he carries the real thing.

What mazes there are in this world. The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father re-created in his models. Mazes in the nodules on murex shells and in the textures of sycamore bark and inside the hollow bones of eagles. None more complicated than the human brain, Etienne would say, what may be the most complex object in existence; one wet kilogram within which spin universes. She

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.

Life: it's happening beyond the mills, beyond the gates. Out there people chase questions of great importance.

Don't tell lies. Lie to yourself, Werner, but don't lie to me.

Every thirty-one hundred years a volume of water equivalent to all the oceans passed through the atmosphere.

The vice minister's wife sits so upright that it seems as if her spine is hewn from oak.

Tre ragazzi passano ridendo e Max li guarda con intensità. Su un muro butterato e chiazzato di licheni è fissata una piccola lapide di pietra. <>Ici a été tuè Buy Gaston Marcel agé de 18 ans, mort pour la France le 11 aout 1944. Jutta si siede per terra. Il mare è gonfio, grigio d'ardesia. Non ci sono lapidi per i tedeschi morti qui.

Werner Pfennig grows up three hundred miles northeast of Paris in a place called Zollverein: a four-thousand-acre coalmining complex outside Essen, Germany. It's steel country, anthracite country, a place full of holes. Smokestacks fume and locomotives trundle back and forth on elevated conduits and leafless trees stand atop slag heaps like skeleton hands shoved up from the underworld.

Snowy, milky, chalky. A color that is the absence of color. Every morning he ties his shoes, packs newspaper inside his coat as insulation against the cold, and begins interrogating the world.

A book not so much full of birds as full of evanescence, of blue-winged, trumpeting mysteries.

Ordnung muss sein.