Quotes from Anthony Doerr

Where do memories go once we've lost our ability to summon them? It

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

Don't you ever get tired of believing, Madame? Don't you ever want proof?

I used to think...that I had to be careful with how much I lived. As if life was a pocketful of coins. You only got so much and you didn't want to spend it all in one place...But now I know that life is the one thing in the world that never runs out. I might run out of mine, and you might run out of yours, but the world will never run out of life. And we're all very lucky to be part of something like that.

They sleep despite noise, despite cold, despite hunger, as though desperate to stay removed from the waking world for as long as possible.

It is not so much the science of snow for me, anymore. I'd rather just look at it. The light, the way it absorbs sound. The way we feel as if the more that falls, the more we are forgiven.

Those last nights in Paris, walking home with her father at midnight, the huge book clasped against her chest, Marie-Laure thinks she can sense a shiver beneath the air, in the pauses between the chirring of the insects, like the spider cracks of ice when too much weight is set upon it. As if all this time the city has been no more than a scale model built by her father and the shadow of a great hand has fallen over it.

Whoever says adults are better at paying attention than children is wrong: we're too busying filtering out the world, focusing on some task or another, paying no attention. Our kids are the ones discovering new contents all day long.

From somewhere comes the sound of fire: the sound of dried roses being crumbled in a fist.

And doesn't a writer do the same thing? Isn't she knitting together scraps of dreams? She hunts down the most vivid details and links them in sequences that will let a reader see, smell, and hear a world that seems complete in itself; she builds a stage set and painstakingly hides all the struts and wires and nail holes, then stands back and hopes whoever might come to see it will believe.

They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.

Werner hears Marie-Laure inhale, Marie-Laure hears Werner scrape three fingernails across the wood, a sound not unlike the sound of a record coursing beneath the surface of a needle, their faces an arm's reach apart. He says, "Es-tu là?

on her best days, she glimpses the limitless span of millennia behind her: millions of years, tens of millions.

all I feel sure of are questions.

Anna remembers something Licinius said: that a story is a way of stretching time.

They'll say you're too little, Werner, that you're from nowhere, that you shouldn't dream big. But I believe in you. I think you'll do something great.

Here's Coleridge, in 1804, when he turned thirty-two: 'Yesterday was my Birth Day. So completely has a whole year passed, with scarcely the fruits of a month. - O Sorrow and Shame...I have done nothing!

It's not so much the contents of the song. It's that the song was still being sung.

The mind craves ease; it encourages the senses to recognize symbols, to gloss. It makes maps of our kitchen drawers and neighborhood streets; it fashions a sort of algebra out of life. And this is useful, even essential - X is the route to work, Y is the heft and feel of a nickel between your fingers. Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We'd pass out every time we saw - actually saw - a flower.

You have minds," Bastian murmurs one evening in the refectory, each boy hunching almost imperceptibly farther over his food as the commandant's finger grazes the back of his uniform. "But minds are not to be trusted. Minds are always drifting toward ambiguity, toward questions, when what you really need is certainty. Purpose. Clarity. Do not trust your minds.

We return to the places we're from; we trample faded corners and pencil in new lines. 'You've grown up so fast,' Robert's mother tells him at breakfast, at dinner. 'Look at you." But she's wrong, thinks Robert. You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.

Werner thinks of her, whether he wishes to or not. Girl with a cane, girl in a gray dress, girl made of mist. That air of otherworldliness in the snarls of her hair and the fearlessness of her step. She takes up residence inside him, a living doppelgänger to face down the dead Viennese girl who haunts him every night.

Turn a page, walk the lines of sentences: the singer steps out, and conjures a world of color and noise in the space inside your head.

I'm thankful that everything sweet is sweet because it is finite.