Quotes from Anthony Doerr

every second it feels as if her father slips farther away.

There was joy in that moment—triumph. But an unexpected fear mixed with it; the stone looked like something enchanted, not meant for human eyes. An object that, once looked at, could never be forgotten.

Funny how to celebrate peace we seem to want to simulate war.

Every process must by law decay.

Werner feels he is gazing down into the circuitry of an enormous radio, each soldier down there an electron flowing single file down his own electrical path, with no more say in the matter than an electron has.

There are moments when von Rumpel feels impatience rising in him like bile, but he forces himself to swallow it back. It will come.

Siga a lógica. Todo efeito tem sua causa, e todo problema tem sua solução. Toda fechadura tem sua chave. Você pode voltar para Paris ou permancer aqui ou seguir em frente.

Though perhaps what has changed are the eyes that see it

Recuérdate, hijo —dice—, no hay clima malo, solo ropa mala.

Yesterday she walked three hours to harvest water lilies from a lake so her kids would have something to eat. And what do our most enlightened leaders suggest we do? Switch to e-billing. Buy three LED bulbs and get a free tote bag. Earth has eight billion people to feed and the extinction rate is a thousand times higher than it was at pre-human levels.

You must never stop believing. That's the most important thing.

The newest crop of cadets grow wild in their urgency to prove themselves.

The wheeling of the night on its silent trunnions.

What you realize, ultimately, when you have nothing to lose, is that even though the world can be kind to you, and reveal its beauty through the thin cracks in everything, in the end it will either take you or leave you.

We think of viruses as evil but in reality few are. Life usually seeks to cooperate, not fight.

animal love, the love of an animal that has been living in an incomprehensible world until one day it encounters another of its kind and realizes that it has been applying its comprehension in the wrong place all along.

For as long as we have been a species, whether with medicine or technology, by gathering power, by embarking on journeys, or by telling stories, we humans have tried to defeat death. None of us ever has.

Cold demanded a sharper, simpler view of things: in those temperatures death hovered at the margins, offering clarity, providing precision. But it blurred things, too: the border between dreams and wakefulness, the way it pulled life from fingers and toes, and released them reluctantly, temporarily. The way the wind came, like news from another, more tenuous world, and stirred the trees.

Marie-Laure will not see anything for the rest of her life. Spaces she once knew as familiar–the four-room flat she shares with her father, the little tree-lined square at the end of her street–have become labyrinths bristling with hazards. Drawers are never where they should be. The toilet is an abyss. A glass of water is too near, too far; her fingers too big, always too big.

I do bad at school because sometimes I think when I should be learning.

To survive here required one to sip the air; the wide sky belonged to the nobles.

The bereaved must understand that should they cross paths with a vukodlak, this shell is not their beloved. Only the flesh has been reanimated; the soul, it is presumed, is safe with God.

They'll say you're too little, Werner, that you're from nowhere, that you shouldn't dream big. But I believe in you Werner. I think you'll do something great. -All The Light We Cannot See

The only way to fall asleep is to stop trying to fall asleep. Sleep is a horizon: the harder you row toward it, the faster it recedes.