Quotes from Anthony Doerr

Inside her pulses something huge, something full of longing, something unafraid.

Rome is a broken mirror, the falling straps of a dress, a puzzle of astonishing complexity. It is an iceberg floating below our terrace, all its ballasts hidden beneath the surface.

Bastian speaks to a horror of any sort of corruption, and yet, Werner wonders in the dead of night, isn't life a kind of corruption?

Stones are just stones and rain is just rain and misfortune is just bad luck. Some things are simply more rare than others, and that's why there are locks.

He thinks of the old broken miners he'd see in Zollverein, sitting in chairs or on crates, not moving for hours, waiting to die. To men like that, time was a surfeit, a barrel they watched slowly drain. When really, he thinks, it's a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop.

A second technician gauges Werner's eye color against a chromatic scale on which sixty or so shades of blue are displayed. Werner's color is himmelblau, sky blue. To assess his hair color, the man snips a lock of hair from Werner's head and compares it to thirty or so other locks clipped to a board, arrayed darkest to lightest. "Schnee," the man mutters, and makes a notation. Snow. Werner's hair is lighter than the lightest color on the board.

found myself? … … down from that high place … … crawled in the grass, the trees … … fingers, toes, a tongue to speak! … the smell of wild onions … … dew, the lines? of the hills, … sweetness of light, moon overhead … … the green beauty of the broken? world.

If there are fireflies this summer, they do not come down the rue Vauborel. Now it seems there are only shadows and silence. Silence is the fruit of the occupation; it hangs in branches, seeps from gutters. ... So many windows are dark. It's as if the city has become a library of books in an unknown language, the houses great shelves of illegible volumes, the lamps all extinguished.

Over time his images of the baby, like photographs handled too often, had worn down and creased, lost their definition.

Even the banana plantations, the big, hardy trees on the flanks of Mount St. Andrew, seemed to lilt and acquiesce in the heat.

The grasses toss and shimmy. The horses nicker. Madame Manec says, almost whispering, "Now that I think about it, child, I expect heaven is a lot like this.

Volkheimer's eyes open as wide as they can. Straining the blackness for every stray photon. A single piano runs up scales. Then back down. He listens to the notes and the silences between them, and then finds himself leading horses through a forest at dawn, trudging through snow behind his great-grandfather, who walks with a saw draped over his huge shoulders, the snow squeaking beneath boots and hooves, all the trees above them whispering and creaking.

Werner looks at the blue of the walls and thinks of Birds of America, yellow-crowned heron, Kentucky warbler, scarlet tanager, bird after glorious bird, and Frederick's gaze remains stuck in some terrible middle ground, each eye a stagnant pool into which Werner cannot bear to look. Relapse In late June 1942, for the first time since her fever, Madame Manec is not in the kitchen when Marie-Laure wakes.

This, she realizes, is the basis of his fear, all fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark.

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

The girl climbs into the swing and pendulums back and forth, pumping her legs, and watching her opens some valve in Werner's soul. This is life, he thinks, this is why we live, to play like this on a day when winter is finally releasing its grip.

Boil the words you already know down to their bones," Rex says, "and usually you find the ancients sitting there at the bottom of the pot, staring back up.

That's how it feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing her hair: as though his love for his daughter will outstrip the limits of his body. The walls could fall away, even the whole city, and the brightness of that feeling would not wane.

War, Etienne thinks distantly, is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity: chocolate or bullets or parachute silk.

All the next day the pleasure of his success lingers in Werner's blood, the memory of how it seemed almost holy to him to walk beside big Volkheimer back to the castle, down through the frozen trees, past the rooms of sleeping boys ranked like gold bars in strongrooms...

It says, Over these three years, our leader has had the courage to face a Europe that was in danger of collapse . . . It says, He alone is to be thanked for the fact that, for German children, a German life has once again become worth living.

when the hairy wildmen who lived there spoke, their words froze and their companions would have to wait for spring to hear what had been said.

It is the obliviousness of our children that saves us.

Ah," he says, more quietly, his accent fading, the faintest touch of dread returning to his voice, "here we are. Home.