Quotes from Anthony Doerr

Doesn't everything," he says, "die at last and too soon?

Werner is succeeding. He is being loyal. He is being what everybody agrees is good. And yet every time he wakes and buttons his tunic, he feels he is betraying something.

Maybe it's that Italy has become familiar enough that I can stop paying attention to it for a few hours a day. Or maybe it's just being back in the country, a place so much more similar to home, where men go for long walks in the hills and people wave to you when you drive past and the background noise is not engines but silence.

His voice bore an astonishing faith, in the slow and beautiful way it trilled sentences, in the way it braided each syllable.

What," he asked into the silence, "is her name?

He was numb forever. What clockless hours passed, what weeks and months? He didn't know.

But now, summer was at its height, offering its sweetest fruits, full of furry fairies and glowing bugs. Alex leaned against me, humming with warm blood, his brain like a different universe.

If it is a hallucination, let it be.

Now it was dark. The airplane descended over Chicago, its galaxy of electric lights, the vast neighborhoods coming clearer as the plane glided toward the airport--streetlights, headlights, stacks of buildings, ice rinks, a truck turning at a stoplight, scraps of snow atop a warehouse and winking antennae on faraway hills, finally the long converging parallels of blue runway lights, and they were down.

husband, a certain thought ringing like a bell calling

Every cell in a dying body winks out at its own pace.

In August she went to the river to watch her husband cast flies with a client, the loops lifting from his rod like a spell cast over the water.

Each time he returned, he looked slightly different, not merely older, but changed: a new accent, the cigarettes, three sharp knocks on the door. It was as if the city was entering his body and remaking it; he'd look at the low dark houses and wandering hens and farmers with their rope belts as if at film from another century.

What is death, after all, but a cessation of involvement with the world, a departure from those you love, and those who love you?

Rumour,Light,Air

what I really wanted to do was write a story that was all backstory, in which multiple protagonists, none of whom are exactly likable, wake up, tell lots of different stories inside the story, argue significant moral points, then wake up a second time and realize the whole thing was a dream.

Both of them lived in the grips of forces they had no control over--the November wind, the revolutions of the earth.

Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitrary.

To be a parent and take an occasional day off from being a parent is a special kind of joy—a lightening, a sweetness made sweeter by its impermanence. We buy tickets, find our seats. The

Anything can be lived around, so long as it's only you who has to do it.

At times he thought he was a wolf and at times he thought he was dead.

every timidity eventually turns into regret.

They want to hear that their kids will take over their world. No one wants to hear that the future is already determined. Death's success rate has been 100% so far, yet we still choose to call it a mystery.

There was, she was learning, strength hidden at the center of weakness, ground at the bottom of the deepest pit.