Quotes from Anthony Doerr

All her life she has been led to believe that she is a child born at the end of things: the empire, the era, the reign of men on earth. But in the glow of the scribes' enthusiasm, she senses that in a city like Urbino, beyond the horizon, other possibilities might exist, and in daydreams she takes flight across the Aegean, through her spread fingers, until she alights in a bright clean palace, full of Justice and Moderation, its rooms lined with books, free to anyone who can read them.

The premier achievement of human history, they said, the triumph of memory over the obliterating forces of destruction and erasure.

My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

He sees what other people don't." What the war did to dreamers.

in time you will come to believe that there is nobility in being part of an enterprise that will outlast you.

Silence is the fruit of the occupation; it hangs in branches, seeps from gutters.

He marveled at the indifference of the world, the way it kept on, despite everything.

Time: the most violent war engine of all.

And yet everything radiates tension, as if the city has been built upon the skin of a balloon and someone is inflating it toward the breaking point.

The very life of any creature is a quick-fading spark in fathomless darkness. That's God's truth.

Do you think, Madame, that in heaven we will really get to see God face-to-face?" "We might." "What if you're blind?" "I'd expect that if God wants us to see something, we'll see it.

Memory builds itself without any clean or objective logic: a dot here, another dot here, and plenty of dark spaces in between. What we know is always evolving, always subdividing. Remember a memory often enough and you can create a new memory, the memory of remembering.

All my life, he thinks, my best companions cannot speak the same language as me.

Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor--it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.

That's how he feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing her hair: as though his love for his daughter will outstrip the limits of his body. The walls could fall away, even the whole city, and the brightness of that feeling would not wane.

A library, no mater how humble or grand, is a series of sacred gateways. You pass through them and leave your own city behind; you journey through time and space; and for a little while, you escape the confines of your own circumstances. Each of us who are readers gets to live through a multiplicity of eras; we get to tiptoe through, to borrow Jorge Luis Borge's phrase, 'a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent, and parallel times.

German sailors sing a drunken song in the street, and a house spider over the stove spins a new web every night, and to Marie-Laure this is a double cruelty: that everything else keeps living, that the spinning earth does not pause for even an instant in its trip around the sun.

How about peaches, dear?" murmurs Madame Manec, and Marie-Laure can hear a can opening, juice slopping into a bowl. Seconds later, she's eating wedges of wet sunlight.

The bony figure of Death rides the streets below, stopping his mount now and then to peer into windows. Horns of fire on his head and smoke leaking from his nostrils and, in his skeletal hand, a list of newly charged with addresses.

This, perhaps, is how lives are measured, a series of abandonments that we hope beyond reason will eventually be reconciled.

Maybe he was dead and this island was purgatory from which he could only watch the souls of the more deserving go shuttling past to their various Edens. What is death, after all, but a cessation of involvement with the world, a departure from those you love, and those who love you?

But have heart. Hope is something that can be very dangerous but without it life would be horribly dry. Impossible, even. Take it from me.

We are mice, he thinks, and the sky swirls with hawks.

The grotto itself comprises its own slick universe, and inside this universe spin countless galaxies: here, in the upturned half of a single mussel shell, lives a barnacle and a tiny spindle shell occupied by a still smaller hermit crab. And on the shell of the crab? A yet smaller barnacle. And on that barnacle?