Quotes from Anthony Doerr

But he was afraid to speak. He could see that speaking would be like dashing some very fragile bond to pieces, like kicking a dandelion gone to seed; the wispy, tenuous sphere of its body would scatter in the wind. So instead they stood together, the snow fluttering down from the clouds to melt into the water where their own reflected images trembled like two people trapped against the glass of a parallel world, and he reached, finally, to take her hand.

I've flung a fly myself, he continues. I'm still learning it. I suppose we're all still learning. You learn and learn and then you die and you haven't learned half of it.

A destroyer is towed in from the horizon. A throbbing of the tug's engines, behind it the quiet gray behemoth rolls a giant wake and Dorotea sees the numbers painted on the sides and ship-sinking cannons that look so calm and clean. Its hull is big as an apartment building; she wonders how she could ever believe her father could learn about something so big. How anyone could learn about something so big.

he wondered if such things were born into people. If perhaps we cannot alter who we are—if the place we come from dictates the place we will end up.

Fishing is about time, he tells Dorotea. It's about how much time you can keep your line in the water. Can't catch fish if your line isn't in the water.

In 1979 Griselda Drown was a senior volleyballer at Boise High, a terrifically tall girl with trunky thighs, slender arms and a volleyball serve that won an Idaho State Championship despite T-shirts claiming it was a team effort.

The Americans were badly discouraged. Twelve days to go, stripped of their gear, sniffling, they huddled in a Kraków McDonald's and invoked middle-school platitudes about Cornwallis's surrender and Valley Forge, about pitching crates of tea into Boston Harbor and bloody-soled snow marches for the good of the Republic. We must not quit now, they mumbled, and dipped their chicken nuggets into a tasteless sauce.

In the twilight the Americans brought gin and tonics to the beach and rented pedal-boats shaped like giant swans. They trolled night crawlers from their bamboo poles, sipped their drinks and nodded to the lovers who paddled among them, spellbound, all of them, in the tangerine dusk.

Death's success rate has been 100% so far, yet we still choose to call it a mystery.

A second birth," Maria Montessori called it, when a child can move away from his mother on his own. And indeed Owen does seem like a new child, rarely crying, constantly at work on getting himself somewhere else.

He sees enough in three weeks to provide ten lifetimes of nightmares.

It was as if all these memories had been hibernating in him, not dead but merely dormant, weathering it out, and now they stumbled out of their thousand dens.

To be in love was to be dazed twenty times a morning: by the latticework of frost on his windshield; by a feather loosed from his pillow; by a soft, pink rim of light over the hills. He slept three or four hours a night. Some days he felt as if he were about to peel back the surface of the Earth—the trees standing frozen on the hills, the churning face of the inlet—and finally witness what lay beneath, the structure under there, the fundamental grid.

The waves continue on their anonymous journeys.

Save yourself, the neighbors had told him. Save yourself. Joseph wonders if he is beyond saving, if the only kind of man who can be saved is the man who never needed saving in the first place.

I will become invisible, he thinks. I will work only at night. I will be so careful they will never suspect me; I will be like the swallows on their gutter, the insects in their lawn, concealed, a scavenger, part of the scenery. When the trees shift in the wind, so I will shift, and when rain falls I will fall too. It will be a kind of disappearing.

is like an angry hen. The more you chase, the harder it is to catch her. You wait, and be patient, and hope that eventually she comes to you.

Then she begins to move her arms in a short, intricate dance, striking the palm of one hand with the edge of the other, circling her fingers through the air, touching her right ear, finally pointing both index fingers at Joseph. He does not know what to make of it. Her fingers repeat the dance: her hands draw a circle; the palms turn up; the fingers lock. Her lips move but no sound comes out. There is a large silver watch on her wrist which rides up and down her forearm as she gesticulates.

All the things he did not see... (a black bear, two hawks, horsemen, a trio of summer cabins far below him...)

Soon there was a horizon, ironed flat as if by the load of the sky, and a sailboat toiling across it.

He thought of his year with Sandy in the house on Shadow Hill, how her eyes went to the windows, the silent desperation of everything they never said—gaps and absences in every conversation, the past circumscribing the present, the future hemming in the past.

Veja os obstáculos como oportunidades. Veja os obstáculos como inspirações.

But he is learning. It is as if he is learning all over again how to put the world into words. A tree is an open hand shaken twice by your right ear; whale is three fingers dipped through a sea made by the opposite forearm. The sky is two hands touched above the head, then swept apart, as though a rift has formed in the clouds and you are swimming through them, into heaven.

There are no more gates within him, no more divisions. It is as if everything he has done in his life has pooled together inside him and slops dully against his edges. His mother, the man he has killed, the languishing garden--he will never be able to live it down, never live through it, never live enough to compensate for all the things he has stolen.