Quotes from Anthony Doerr

Tucked between the last two pages, she finds an old sealed envelope. He has written For Frederick across the front. Frederick: the bunkmate Werner used to write about, the boy who loved birds. He sees what other people don't. What the war did to dreamers.

Abrid los ojos y observad todo lo que podáis antes de cerrarlos para siempre»

Maybe the idea was that he could write so many letters, deliver so many envelopes back to Sandy, eventually he'd have sent all of himself, and could exist more there than he did here.

You remembers, boy," he says, "there is no bad weathers, only bad clothes.

he moved neither forward nor backward in time, but merely endured variations of the same day over and over. Maybe he was the one trapped underwater, under a Plexiglas floor, while the world moved on, men and women checking in and out of rooms, lugging overstuffed suitcases, the soles of their shoes passing lightly above him.

a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.

The urge to know scrapes against the inability to know.

The entropy of a closed system never decreases. Every process must by law decay.

But on most days, especially the warm ones, life exhausts him; the worsening traffic and graffiti and company politics, everyone grousing about bonuses, benefits, overtime. Sometimes in the slow heat of summer, long before dawn, Volkheimer paces in the harsh dazzle of the billboard light and feels his loneliness on him like a disease.

We live through books; we have adventures in them, we lead alternative lives through them. We expand our memories through them. And that sometimes art can offer us more intense experiences of the world than life itself can.

He made such a faint presence. It was like being in the room with a feather.

Memory is a house with ten thousand rooms; it is a village slated to be inundated." from "Village 113

Every part of him wants to scream: is this not wrong? But here it is right.

Madams Manec's energy, Marie-Lauren is learning, is extraordinary; she burgeons, shoots off stalks, wakes early, works late, concocts basques without a drop of cream, loaves with less than a cup of flour. They clomp together through the narrow streets, Marie-Laure's hand on the back of Madame's apron, following the odors of her stews and cakes; in such moments Madame seems like a great moving wall of rose bushes, thorny and fragrant and crackling with bees.

He could see tiny particles of dust drifting in the air between her ankles, each fleck tumbling individually in and out of the sunlight, and there was something intensely familiar in their arrangement.

Don´t you ever get tired of believing, Madame? Don´t you ever want proof? Madame Manec rests a hand on Marie-Laure's forehead. The thick hand that first reminded her of a gardener's or a geologist's. You must never stop believing. That's the most important thing.

She reaches for his hand, sets something in his palm, and squeezes his hand into a fist. "Goodbye, Werner." "Goodbye, Marie-Laure.

She is in charge of everything, but no one knows. It is a tremendous burden, she says, to be responsible for every little thing, every infant born, every leaf falling from every tree, every wave that breaks onto the beach, every ant on its journey.

he that knows all that Learning ever writ, knows only this--that he knows nothing yet. [Antonius Diogenes, trans. by Zeno Ninis]

When all you have is a shard of papyrus with a few words on it," Rex says, "or a single line quoted in somebody else's text, the potential of what's lost haunts you. It's like the boys who died in Korea. We grieve them the most because we never saw the men they would become." Zeno thinks of his father: how much easier it was to be a hero when you no longer walked the earth.

Each sign signifies a sound, and to link sounds is to form words, and to link words is to construct worlds.

Stranger, whoever you are, open this to learn what will amaze you.

Day after day, the tall Italian said, year after year, time wipes the old books from the world.

He blinks; he has to swallow back tears. The parlor looks the same as it always has: two cribs beneath two Latin crosses, dust floating in the open mouth of the stove, a dozen layers of paint peeling off the baseboards. A needlepoint of Frau Elena's snowy Alsatian village above the sink. Yet now there is music. As if, inside Werner's head, an infinitesimal orchestra has stirred to life.