Quotes from Anthony Doerr

A person can get up and leave her life. The world is that big.

In a corner of the city, inside a tall, narrow house at Number 4 rue Vauborel, on the sixth and highest floor, a sightless sixteen-year-old named Marie-Laure LeBlanc kneels over a low table covered entirely with a model.

Her uncle seems almost a child, monastic in the modesty of his needs and wholly independent of any sort of temporal obligations. And yet she can tell he is visited by fears so immense, so multiple, that she can almost feel the terror pulsing inside him. As though some beast breathes all the time at the windowpanes of his mind.

Moonlight: his ropy tail, his shaggy cloven hooves. God knits him together in the womb of Beauty beside his brother and he lives for three winters and dies hundreds of miles from home and for what? Tree lies down in the reeds and fouls the air around him and Omeir wonders what the animal understands and what will happen to Moonlight's two beautiful horns and every breath sends another crack through his heart.

Every rumor carries a seed of truth, Etienne.

A ciência, meu rapaz, é construída com erros, mas são erros úteis, porque levam, pouco a pouco, até à verdade.

The city, thinks Marie-Laure, is slowly being remade into the model upstairs. Streets sucked empty one by one. Each time she steps outside, she becomes aware of all the windows above her. The quiet is fretful, unnatural. It's what a mouse must feel, she thinks, as it steps from its hole into the open blades of a meadow, never knowing what shadow might come cruising above.

Racial purity, political purity–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? A child is born, and the world sets in upon it. Taking things from it, stuffing things into it. Each bite of food, each particle of light entering the eye–the body can never be pure.

Static static static static static.

Aethon: Lived 80 Years a Man, 1 Year a Donkey, 1 Year a Sea Bass, 1 Year a Crow.

They can march for days without eating. They impregnate every schoolgirl they meet.

in a moment of disorientation, he feels that he's looking not up but down, as though a spotlight has been shined into a wedge of bloodshot water, and the sky has become the sea, and the airplanes are hungry fish, harrying their prey in the dark.

You will eat country and breathe nation.

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.

It strikes Werner just then as wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing indifference of the world—what pretensions humans have!

A way for a small thing to destroy a much larger thing.

A fourteen-year-old girls sits cross-legged on the floor of a circular vault. "And the tale I have to tell is so ludicrous, so incredible, that you'll never believe a word of it, and yet"—she taps the end of his nose—"it's true.

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.

Rainwater purls from cloud to roof to eave.

Why bother to make music when the silence and wind are so much larger? Why light lamps when the darkness will inevitably snuff them? When Russian prisoners are chained by threes and fours to fences while German privates tuck live grenades in their pockets and run?

We leave our bodies behind in this world so that we may take flight into the next.

Opera houses! Cities on the moon! Ridiculous. They would all do better to put their faces on the curbs and wait for the boys who come through the city dragging sledges stacked with corpses.

He thinks of the Christians sitting up on the walls, and the people praying inside the houses and churches of the city, and he wonders at the mystery of how one god can manage the thoughts and terrors of so many.

What do I care, she whispers, for cities and princes and histories?