Quotes from Anthony Doerr

Doesn't look like much, does he?" murmurs Fredrick. "Hardly a couple of ounces of feathers and bones. But that bird can fly to Africa and back. Powered by bugs and worms and desire.

Sometimes, kid, we all need a little help shoveling the shit.

His mother the Ice Queen. The only thing he still had of hers was a book: Snow Crystals, by W. A. Bentley. Inside were thousands of carefully prepared micrographs of snowflakes, each image reproduced in a two-inch square, the crystals white against a field of black, arrayed in a grid, four-by-three, twelve per page.

books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.

but one of the dying's imperatives is to make the living see them. This is nobody's fault, but it is everybody's burden.

To enter a world of shadows is to leave this world for another.

One by one the ponds gulped down their ice like big, painful pills.

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

Don't you want to be alive before you die?

But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don't you do the same?

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

You know the greatest lesson of history? It's that history is whatever the victors say it is. That's the lesson. Whoever wins, that's who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.

All your life you wait, and then it finally comes, and are you ready?

When I lost my sight, 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?

We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.

How do you ever know for certain that you are doing the right thing?

What do we call visible light? We call it color. But the electromagnetic spectrum runs to zero in one direction and infinity in the other, so really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.

A real diamond is never perfect.

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

Your problem, Werner," says Frederick, "is that you still believe you own your life.

Some people are weak in some ways, sir. Others in other ways.

His voice is low and soft, a piece of silk you might keep in a drawer and pull out only on rare occasions, just to feel it between your fingers.

A line comes back to Marie-Laure from Jules Verne: Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.