Quotes from Anthony Doerr

There is pride, too, though - pride that he has done it alone. That his daughter is so curious, so resilient. There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing. That's how it 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.

when God stops whispering, they become desperate for someone who can put things right.

How do men convince themselves that others must die so they might live?

So many windows are dark. It's as if the city has become a library of books in an unknown language, the houses great shelves of illegible volumes, the lamps all extinguished. But there is a machine in the attic at work again. A spark in the night.

quick-witted, an open book in her lap; inside her chest pulses something huge, something full of longing, something unafraid.

Because of the diamond in your coat pocket. Because I left it here to protect you. All it has done is put me in more danger. Then why hasn't the house been hit? Why hasn't it caught fire? It's a rock, Papa. A pebble. There is only luck, bad or good. Chance and physics. Remember? You are alive. I am only alive because I have not yet died.

By age seventeen he [Seymoure Sthulman]'d convinced himself that every human being he saw was a parasite, captive to the dictates of consumption. But as he reconstructs Zeno's translation, he realizes that the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we all are beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.

To consider water on any scale was to confront a boundless repetition of small events. There were the tiny wonders: rain drops, snow crystals, grains of frost aligned on a blade of grass; and there were the wonders so immense it seemed impossible to get his mind around them: global wind, oceanic currents, storms that broke like waves over whole mountain ranges. p 46

I am hearing you. On radio. Is why I come.

Why, Esther wonders, do any of us believe our lives lead outward through time? How do we know we aren't continually traveling inward, toward our centers? Because this is how it feels to Esther when she sits on her deck in Geneva, Ohio, in the last spring of her life; it feels as if she is being drawn down some path that leads deeper inside, toward a miniature, shrouded, final kingdom that has waited within her all along.

The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light.

It strikes Werner just then as wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing indifference of the world—what pretensions humans have! Why bother to make music when the silence and wind are so much larger? Why light lamps when the darkness will inevitably snuff them?

Am I following a path already laid out for me, or am I making it myself?

He thinks: I only want to sit here with her for a thousand hours.

Not-knowing is always more thrilling than knowing. Not-knowing is where hope and art and possibility and invention come from. It is not-knowing, that old, old thing, that allows everything to be renewed.

So really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.

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.

it is splendid to drowse on the davenport, to be warm and fed, to feel the sentences hoist her up and carry her somewhere else.

wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing indifference of the world—what pretensions humans have! Why bother to make music when the silence and wind are so much larger? Why light lamps when the darkness will inevitably snuff them?

Draw the darkness ... and it will point out the light which has been in the paper all the while. Inside this world is folded another." from "Afterworld.

Music spirals out of the radios, and it is splendid to drowse on the davenport, to be warm and fed, to feel the sentences hoist her up and carry her somewhere else.

I will never leave you, not in a million years.

You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.

Boil the words you already know down to their bones,' Rex [Browning] says, 'and usually you find the ancients sitting there at the bottom of the pot, staring back up.