Quotes from Anthony Doerr

here comes the light, nameless and intangible, streaming 93 million unobstructed miles through the implacable black vacuum to break itself against a wall, a cornice, a column. It drenches, it crenellates, it textures, It throws the city into relief. The coins fall through the slot; the illumination box clicks on.

Ignorance was, in the end, and in so many ways, a privilege.

It was not," says Jutta, reaching the limits of her French, "very easy to be good then.

All morning I lay down sentences, erase them, and try new ones. Soon enough, when things go well, the world around me dwindles: the sky out the window, the furious calm of the big umbrella pine ten feet away, the smell of dust falling onto the hot bulb in the lamp. That's the miracle of writing, the place you try to find--when the room, your body, and even time itself cooperate in a vanishing act.

You must never stop believing. That's the most important thing." - Madam Manec

Winkler's breath plumed up onto his glasses. The entire valley was enveloped in a huge, illuminated stillness. Above him the clouds had pulled away and the sky burned with stars. The meadow smoldered with light, and the spruce had become illuminated kingdoms, snow sifting from branch to branch. He thought: This has been here every winter all my life.

And then today the doctor tells us of this American who was cured of the same disease by a snail. Such a simple cure. Elegant, would you not say? A snail that accomplishes what laboratory capsules cannot. Allah, we reason, must be involved in something so elegant. So you see.

Hope was a sunrise, a friend in an alley, a whisper in an empty corridor.

Hope is something that can be very dangerous but without it life would be horribly dry. Impossible, even.

the doctor recognizes himself in the bear's awareness, a nameless silhouette in the landscape, cleansed of every accusation;

as if the imminent could not wait to become the past, or the present lunged at the future, eager for what would be.

This snowy-haired dreamer plucked out of the soot.

Clouds like those," he'd show her, "are called cumulus congestus. Each one is riding along on a big column of slowly cooling air. Like a big invisible ice-cream cone. That small cloud there probably weighs five hundred thousand pounds." "Nooo," she'd say. "It's floating—it weighs nothing." Still, she would not look away.

El aire es una biblioteca y registro de todas las vidas vividas, de todas las frases dichas, de todas las palabras que aún reverberan

The love for your kids, I'm learning, is a kind of love that has no conclusion, a feeling that multiplies back on itself.

Who among us, in our lowest hour, can expect to be saved? Have you loved your life? Have you cherished each miraculous breath?

?????, ornis, it means both bird and omen—

La esperanza es algo que puede ser muy peligroso, pero sin ella la vida sería horriblemente árida, imposible, incluso.

If we don't talk to the thing we are afraid of, it becomes the thing we hope to kill.

Así es como se miden, quizás, las cosas, por una serie de abandonos que confirmamos, contra toda esperanza, en poder llegar a aceptar algún día.

I needed to be reminded, when I caught myself deep in a years-old argument with my husband, alone and furious on the mostly empty midday subway, that he had been real—that my unhappiness was not only some chemical dysfunction of mine.

Death can seem so final, like a blade dropped through the neck. But the nature of death is not at all final. It is not some dark cliff off which we leap. I hope to show you it is merely a fog, something we can peer into and out of, something we can know and face and not necessarily fear. By each life taken from our collective lives we are diminished. But even in death we have much to celebrate. It is only a transition, like so many others.

Che cosa non ha fatto, la guerra, ai sognatori.

The world had become like an exhibit at Ward's museum: pretty and nostalgic and watered down, something old and sealed off you weren't allowed to touch. - Pg. 204