Quotes from Anthony Doerr

They die so easily, he boasts. It is like sprinkling salt onto the backs of slugs.

The path unspools much too slowly. His fly rod snags on brambles, the fly line is suddenly, immediately, miserably tangled, how do such things happen, how do such horrific tangles suddenly emerge from thin straight lines?

To discover fossils, he told himself, was to reclaim answers to important questions.

But he didn't have language for what he really wanted to say; he couldn't explain how her wildness that day, on the road, had thrilled him as much as it terrified him. He couldn't tell her that at night, sweating in the folds of his mosquito net, he had begun to recite her name over and over, as if it were a spell that might summon her into his room.

You must learn to let go. Believe me, it's not easy. But you must let whatever will happen, happen

By then Mkondo had become more than a game; it was the one way she could be certain she was alive.

What is time? he wrote in his pad. Must time occur in sequence—beginning to middle to end—or is this only one way to perceive it? Maybe time can spill and freeze and retreat; maybe time is like water, endlessly cycling through its states.

The big trunk of the umbrella pine looms outside the window, living its two lives—the upper world of needles and stems, the lower world of roots and soil.

At night Ward tossed in self-loathing: how, he wondered, can you want something so badly, finally get it, and yet wind up discontented? And how can it happen so quickly? When he finally could sink into sleep his dreams boiled with faceless devils; he woke--gasping--with their talons on his windpipe.

She was learning that in her life everything--health, happiness, even love--was subject to the landscape; the weathers of the world were inseparable from the weathers of her soul.

Cat de sus poti sa sari, daca locuiesti pe Marte?

But when she imagined college she thought of her dreary days in the schoolhouse in Lushoto, the heat of classrooms, the impatience of mathematics, bland two-dimensional maps pinned to walls. Green for land, blue for water, stars for capital cities. Schoolmasters obsessed with naming things that had existed unnamed for a million years.

We are dust only after all our water evaporates.

she gazed at places but could not enter them, witnessed beauty but could not experience it. It was as though she had been excised neatly out of each moment. 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.

A good journal entry—like a good song, or sketch, or photograph—ought to break up the habitual and lift away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought be a love letter to the world. Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.

Sometimes I understood what a word meant from reading but had never met it in life.

It was rapture, the oldest feeling, a sensation like rising from the thick canopy of forest and turning, looking out over the treetops, seeing the world again, for the first time.

How to render three dimensions in two, the world in planar spaces. It's the central challenge for every artist, Naima. Naima stepped back, reexamined her photo. Artist? she thought. An artist?

What a thing, half bird, half lizard, part one thing, part another, trapped forever between more perfect states.

The only way to find something, she said, is to lose it first.

All those moments, captured and doubled onto film, frozen, her own museum of natural history unfolding in front of her.

The Reich must need socks." "For what?" "For feet, Jutta (73).

But what was family? Surely more than genes, eye color, flesh. Family was story: truth and struggle and retribution. Family was time.

from Marilynne Robinson's Gilead comes back to me. "There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.