Quotes from Anthony Doerr

On est très loin de comprendre ce que c'est d'être aveugle, quand on ferme les yeux.

Madame Ruelle, the baker's wife—a pretty-voiced woman who smells mostly of yeast but also sometimes of face powder or the sweet perfume of sliced apples—straps a stepladder to the roof of her husband's car and drives the Route de Carentan at dusk with Madame Guiboux and rearranges road signs with a ratchet set.

We shall march onwards, Even if everything crashes down in pieces; For today the nation hears us, And tomorrow the world!

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-

Of all the mad things we humans do, Rex once told him, there might be nothing more humbling, more noble, than trying to translate the dead languages. We don't know how the old Greeks sounded when they spoke; we can scarcely map their words onto ours; from the very start, we're doomed to fail. 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.

Scraps of burned paper float overhead.

Four years of occupation, and the roar of oncoming bombers is the roar of what? Deliverance? Extirpation? The clack-clack of small-arms fire. The gravelly snare drums of flak. A dozen pigeons roosting on the cathedral spire cataract down its length and wheel out over the sea.

Singular and plural, noun stems and verb cases: Rex's enthusiasm for ancient Greek carries them through the worst hours.

In stormy light, its granite glows blue. At the highest tides, the sea creeps into basements at the very center of town. At the lowest tides, the barnacled ribs of a thousand shipwrecks stick out above the sea.

not shifting so the desk frame doesn't go screek screek, not breathing so he doesn't smell any smells, but sweat is trickling down his ribs, and Wesley Ohman keeps opening and closing the Velcro on his left shoe, and Tony Molinari's lips are going poppoppop, and Mrs. Onegin is writing a huge, terrible A-M-E-R-I-C- on the whiteboard, the marker tip rasping and squeaking, the classroom clock ticktickticking, and all these sounds race into his head like hornets into a nest.

the space going a bit redder as the August day above them progresses toward dusk.

from these Icarian heights, my feathers powdered with the dust of the stars, 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.

What treasures they left behind! A gorgeous set of yellow topaz crystals on a gray matrix. A great pink hunk of beryl like a crystallized brain. A violet column of tourmaline from Madagascar that looks so rich he cannot resist the urge to stroke it. Bournonite; apatite on muscovite; natural zircon in a spray of colors; dozens more minerals he cannot name.

He slips out the door and Konstance sits with her back against the wall and Mother paces, chin jutted, forehead creased, and Konstance goes to the door and presses it.

to feel the sentences hoist her up and carry her somewhere else.

What you already have is better than what you so desperately seek.

Ele tinha uma presença tão apagada. Era como estar em uma sala com uma pena. Mas a alma dele brilhava com uma bondade fundamental...

A fourth door, and a fifth, on and on until you reach a thirteenth, a little locked door no bigger than a shoe." The children lean forward. "And then?" "Behind the thirteenth door"—the guide flourishes one of his impossibly wrinkled hands—"is the Sea of Flames." Puzzlement. Fidgeting. "Come now. You've never heard of the Sea of Flames?

The wizard laughed. "Even if you grew wings, foolish fish, you could not fly to a place that is not real." "Wrong," I said, "it does exist. Even if you don't believe in it, I do. Otherwise what's it all been for?

Los sordos pueden oír los latidos de su propio corazón, frau Elena?

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

Different days pass verdict on different men, and only the last day a final verdict on all men, and consequently no day is to be trusted.

Before you eat, drink as much water as you can, and you will feel full more quickly.

But to raise one's hopes is to risk their falling further.