Quotes from Anthony Doerr

Isn't doing nothing a kind of troublemaking?

Nothing will be healed in this kitchen. Some griefs can never be put right ... She only wants a tide of normality to wash in and cover everything again.

Our shadows are our histories. We drag them everywhere.

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

You ever hope for something so much? So much you can't sleep, so much your skull hurts? But the thing is, you don't even know if the thing you're wishing for is possible? You don't even know if it could happen? And it's all out of your control?

A good journal entry- like a good song, or sketch, or photograph- ought to break up the habitual and life away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought to be a love letter to the world.

Marie-Laure smiles, and he laughs a pure, contagious laugh, one she will try to remember all her life, father and daughter turning in circles on the sidewalk in front of their apartment house, laughing together while snow sifts through the branches above.

When really, he thinks, it's a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop.

Uncle Etienne says heaven is like a blanket babies cling to.

The window glows. The slow sandy light of dawn permeates the room. Everything transient and aching; everything tentative. To be here, in this room, high in this house, out of the cellar, with her: it is like medicine.

Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don't you do the same?" He says, "Not in years. But today. Today maybe I did.

Almost overnight, the streets glow with meaning. She reads inscriptions on coins, on cornerstones and tombstones, on lead seals and buttress piers and marble plaques embedded into the defensive walls—each twisting lane of the city a great battered manuscript in its own right.

There are none so distant that fate cannot bring them together.

There is magic in this place, the owl seems to say. You just have to sit and breathe and wait and it will find you. He sits and breathes and waits and the Earth travels another thousand kilometers along its orbit. Lifelong knots deep inside the boy loosen.

He says, "I saved her only to hear her die.

What use are memories when memories can do little more than fade?

The stars were so many and so white they looked like chips of ice, hammered through the fabric of the sky.

A demonic horde. Upended sacks of beans. A hundred broken rosaries. There are a thousand metaphors and all of them are inadequate: forty bombs per aircraft, four hundred and eighty altogether, seventy-two thousand pounds of explosives.

We all grew up before we were grown up.

He wants to tell her that when things vanish they become something else, in death we rise again in the blades of grass, the splitting bodies of seeds.

You can cling to this world for a thousand years and still be plucked out of it in a breath.

Some griefs can never be put right.

To rescue one phrase from oblivion? It's the most exciting thing, I can't tell you: it's like digging up one end of a buried wire and realizing that it's connected to someone eighteen centuries dead.

And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.