Quotes from Anthony Doerr

Dlaczego tak trudno siÄ™ uwolni? od to?samoÅ›ci, które nam przypisano, gdy byliÅ›my dzie?mi?

It was the summer when fireflies showed up in Saint-Malo, and their father was very excited, building long-handled nets for his boys and giving them jars with wire to fasten over the tops, and Etienne and Henri raced through the tall grass as the fireflies floated away from them, illuming on and off, always seeming to rise just beyond their reach, as if the earth were smoldering and these were sparks that their footfalls had prodded free.

uzmys?awia sobie, ?e prawda jest niesko?czenie bardziej skomplikowana, ?e wszyscy jeste?my pi?kni, nawet je?li wszyscy stanowimy cz??? problemu, i ?e by? cz??ci? problemu to by? cz?owiekiem.

a bondade, mais do que qualquer outra coisa, é o que perdura.

But in the attempt, Rex said, in trying to drag something across the river from the murk of history into our time, into our language: that was, he said, the best kind of fool's errand.

Se pelo menos a vida fosse como um romance de Júlio Verne... e você pudesse passar as páginas para a frente, quando precisasse, para descobrir o que estava para acontecer.

Você nunca pode deixar de acreditar.

Frau Elena paces the parlor, her slippers whispering left, whispering right. Coal cars grind past in the wet dark. Machinery hums in the distance: pistons throbbing, belts turning. Smoothly. Madly.

The things that look fixed in this 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. From the perspective of God, cities like this come and go like anthills.

There are two kinds of death," he says, the clouds of his breath plunging out into the cold. "You can fight like a lion. Or you can go as easy as lifting a hair from a cup of milk.

We are young, they sing, we are steadfast, we have never compromised, we have so many castles yet to storm.

And to Marie Laure 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.

Today, he says, they will work on ?????, mýthos, which means a conversation or something said, but also a tale or a story, a legend from the time of the old gods, and he is explaining how it's a delicate, mutable word, that it can suggest something false and true at the same time, when his attention frays.

It's the absence of all the bodies, she thinks, that allows us to forget. It's that the sod seals them over.

every lost book, before it vanished forever, got down to one final copy somewhere, and how it made Hillary think about seeing a white rhinoceros in a zoo in Czechoslovakia once, how the sign said the rhino was one of the last twenty northern white rhinos in the world, the only one left in Europe

Why can't healing happen as quickly as wounding? You twist an ankle, break a bone—you can be hurt in a heartbeat. Hour by hour, week by week, year by year, the cells in your body labor to remake themselves the way they were the instant before your injury. But even then you're never the same: not quite.

O take me, take me up into the ranks so that I do not die a common death! I do not want to die in vain, what I want is to fall on the sacrificial mound.

But Omeir felt something close to despair, and sensed that, even at his age, his feelings would not be welcome, that he should hide them even from his own grandfather. Why mourn, Grandfather would say, what men can do? There's something wrong with a child who sympathizes more with other beings than he does with men.

For a moment Zeno feels that he might be able to speak it into existence: if he says exactly the right words, right now, like a magic spell, it will happen.

My God, there are none so distant that fate cannot bring them together.

Did you know," says Marie-Laure, "that the chance of being hit by lightning is one in one million? Dr. Geffard taught me that." "In one year or in one lifetime?" "I'm not sure." "You should have asked.

You will strip away your weakness, your cowardice, your hesitation. You will become like a waterfall, a volley of bullets—you will all surge in the same direction at the same pace toward the same cause. You will forgo comforts; you will live by duty alone. You will eat country and breathe nation.

Parisian cousins nobody has heard from in decades now write letters begging for capons, hams, hens. The dentist is selling wine through the mail.

Five months ago the hillside beyond the wire was home to red squirrels black finches pygmy shrews garter snakes downy woodpeckers swallowtail butterflies wolf lichen monkey flowers ten thousand voles five million ants. Now what is it?