Quotes from Anthony Doerr

I saw the earth far below as it really was, a little mud-heap in a great vastness, its kingdoms only cobwebs, its armies only crumbs.

Hope is the pillar that holds up the world.'

Aethon doesn't read to the end of the book?" "That's how he writes his story on the tablets," says Rachel. "How they get buried in the tomb with him. Because he doesn't stay in Cloud Cuckoo Land. He chooses… What's the word, Mr. Ninis?

A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.

You know the greatest lesson of history? It's that history is whatever the victors say it is. That's the lesson. Whoever wins, that's who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.

The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. It brims with color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world of light?

Open your eyes and see what you can before they close forever.

Smart beyond your years. There are places for a boy like you.

The tide climbs. The moon hangs small and yellow and gibbous. On the rooftops of beachfront hotels to the east, and in the gardens behind them, a half-dozen American artillery units drop incendiary rounds into the mouths of mortars.

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio K

When he smiles you can see his incisors. She knows that walk, that face, those eyebrows.

Ca inchipuiti mai sunt oamenii! De ce sa te obosesti sa compui muzica daca tacerea si vantul sunt mai cuprinzatoare? De ce sa aprinzi lampi daca intunericul, inevitabil, le va stinge?

Everyone is asleep or pretending to be.

the goddess spiraled down from the night. She had a white body, gray wings, and a bright orange mouth like a beak, and although she was not as large as I expected a goddess to be, I became afraid. She landed on her yellow feet and took a few steps and began picking at a pile of seaweed.

Exalted daughter of Zeus," I said, "I beg you, say the magic incantation to deliver me from this form into another, so that I might fly to the city in the clouds where all needs are met and no one suffers and every day shines like the very first days at the birth of the world.

Drunken, foolhardy Aethon mistakes a magical city in a play for a real place. He sets off for Thessaly, land of magic, and accidentally turns himself into a donkey.

even in the midst of grief the mind grapples with a hundred impressions: a pain below the heart, an odor on the breeze.

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.

the remedy to every woe is prayer

Dar Dumnezeu e doar un ochi alb si rece, un sfert de luna atarnand deasupra fumului, clipind într-una, in timp ce oraÈ™ul e facut praf si pulbere.

He feels ragged. For weeks logic has been failing him. The stone the museum has asked him to protect is not real. If it were, the museum would have sent men already to collect it. Why then, when he puts a magnifying glass to it, do its depths reveal tiny daggers of flames?

He adopts a silver-muzzled sixty-five-pound brindle dog named Luther, walks him through the front door of the house, dumps a can of beef and barley stew into a bowl, and watches Luther engulf it. Then the dog sniffs around his surroundings as though in disbelief at his reversal of fortune.

He that knows all that Learning ever writ, knows only this -- that he knows nothing yet.

All her life she has been led to believe that she is a child born at the end of things: the empire, the era, the reign of men on earth.