Quotes from Anthony Doerr

We are the bridge generations, the intermediaries, the ones who do the work so that our descendants will be ready.

Violins, horns, drums, speeches—a mouth against a microphone in some faraway yet simultaneous evening—the sorcery of it holds him rapt.

How wonderful it is to by my age - our age - and learn you were wrong about such a fundamental thing.

and he thinks of Argus Panoptes, the watchman of Hera, who had eyeballs all over his head and even on the tips of his fingers, so many eyes that when he closed fifty of them to sleep he held fifty more open to keep watch.

But I wasn't trying to reach England. Or Paris. I thought that if I made the broadcast powerful enough, my brother would hear me. That I could bring him some peace, protect him as he had always protected me.

For lunches he rode the elevator to the fourth-floor food court and ate Thai Town or Subway at a table tucked among potted tropicals, gazing past milling teenagers to the little penny-choked fountain where a copper salmon spat water into a chlorinated pool.

all times and all stories being one and the same in the end.

Werner turns the fine-tune dial fractionally, and abruptly the voice booms into his ears, Dvee-nat-set, shayst-nat-set, davt-set-adeen, nonsense, terrible nonsense, pipelined directly into his head; it's like reaching into a sack full of cotton and finding a razor blade inside, everything constant and undeviating and then that one dangerous thing, so sharp you can hardly feel it open your skin.

Yet they spoke now across a glass-topped dining table as if words were just words, as if their histories were equivalent.

Somewhere in these streets, plastic was invented. X-rays were discovered, continental drift was identified. What marvels does science cultivate here now?

Can deaf people hear their heartbeat?

They would not get closer to the truth that night. They watched a period of hockey in silence. Winkler insisted on doing the dishes. Herman insisted on driving him to the bus stop.

An hour passed and another and then, like a glass of water overfilled - the meniscus inverting, going convex, gravity pulling at the edges, the overflow finally giving way - he could not longer suffer his own cowardice.

the woman talking to Frederick's mother is wearing a nauseating quantity of perfume.

El mar es todo. Cubre siete décimas partes del globo… El mar no es más que un receptáculo para todas las criaturas prodigiosas y sobrenaturales

Your problem, Werner," says Frederick, "is that you still believe you own your life.

It's only numbers, cadet…Pure math. You have to accustom yourself to thinking that way

Every few minutes a fresh gust of lightness sweeps through Zeno. There was that name, Hillary, but what of it? If Rex has found a Hillary, bless him. He made it out. He is alive. He has invited Zeno for "a bit of a function.

The dread that had been rising all morning rose higher in his throat as if by capillary action.

Firelit rooms lined with books - these are the places in which important things happen.

trying and failing to summon the courage to go out.

Men lie injured and dying between the old headstones: Macedonians, Albanians, Wallachians, Serbians, some in so much agony that they seem reduced to something less than human, as though pain were a leveling wave, a mortar troweled over everything that person once was.

Her smile was genuine-looking and later he would mull her question over and over in his head until it mushroomed into something larger.

Casi todas las especies que han existido alguna vez se han extinguido en el presente. No hay ningún motivo para pensar que con la raza humana vaya a ocurrir algo distinto.