Quotes from Anthony Doerr

The moon sets and the eastern sky lightens, the hem of night pulling away, taking stars with it one by one until only two are left.

Forgetting, he is learning, is how the world heals itself.

Why can't healing happen as quickly as wounding?

There are, he assures her, no such things as curses. There is luck, maybe, bad or good. A slight inclination of each day towards success or failure. But no curses.

The very life of any creature is a quick-fading spark in fathomless darkness.

I know why those librarians read the old stories to you," Rex says. "Because if it's told well enough, for as long as the story lasts, you get to slip the trap.

He was a just a boy. They all were. Even the largest of them.

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

Some stories," she says, "can be both false and true at the same time.

Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.

This is life, he thinks, this is why we live, to play like this on a day when winter is finally releasing its grip.

Every hour, Robert thinks, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new. They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like bread crumbs. The world is remade.

Walk the paths of logic. Every outcome has its cause, and every predicament has its solution. Every lock its key.

Madame? What do I look like?" "You have many thousands of freckles." "Papa used to say they were like stars in heaven. Like apples in a tree.

Fear of the thing," Maher murmurs, more to himself than to Omeir, "will be more powerful than the thing itself.

And as he looked, turning the leaf over and back, Aethon saw that the cities on both sides of the page, the dark ones and the bright ones, were one and the same, that there is no peace without war, no life without death, and he was afraid.

To shut you eyes is to guess nothing of blindness.

The upperclassman hands over a third pail. "Throw it," commands Bastian. The night steams, the stars burn, the prisoner sways, the boys watch, the commandant tilts his head. Frederick pours the water onto the ground. "I will not.

In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.

See obstacles as opportunities, Reinhold. See obstacles as inspirations.

Things hardly ever work on the first try. We'll make another, a better one.

Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We'd pass out every time we saw— actually saw— a flower. Imagine if we only got to see a cumulonimbus cloud or Cassiopeia or a snowfall once a century: there'd be pandemonium in the streets. People would lie by the thousands in the fields on their backs.

Don't tell me how to grieve. Don't tell me ghosts fade away eventually, like they do in movies, waving goodbye with see-through hands. Lots of things fade away but ghosts like these don't, heartbreak like these doesn't.

Movies make you think civilization will end fast, like with aliens and explosions, but really it'll end slow. Ours is already ending, it's just ending too slow for people to notice.