Anthony Doerr Quotes

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

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

“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.”

“It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.”

“I am only alive because I have not yet died.”

“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?”

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

“isn’t life a kind of corruption? A child is born, and the world sets in upon it. Taking things from it, stuffing things into it.”

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

“If only life were like a Jules Verne novel, thinks Marie-Laure, and you could page ahead when you most needed to, and learn what would happen.”

“That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much. Only the strongest people can turn away from feelings like that.”

“all I feel sure of are questions.”

“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.”

“And yet she can tell he is visited by fears so immense, so multiple, that she can almost feel the terror pulsing inside him. As though some beast breathes all the time at the windowpanes of his mind.”

“Seventy-six years old," she whispers, "and I can still feel like this? Like a little girl with stars in my eyes?”

“Don’t you want to be alive before you die?”

“War is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity: chocolate or bullets or parachute silk.”

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

“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.”

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

“Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.”

“Stones are just stones and rain is just rain and misfortune is just bad luck.”

“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.”

“To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.”

“She walks like a ballerina in dance slippers, her feet as articulate as hands, a little vessel of grace moving out into the fog.”

“The way her fingers flutter through the space around her. Each a thing he hopes never to forget.”

“What the war did to dreamers.”

“This, she realizes, is the basis of all fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark.”

“Is it right,” Jutta says, “to do something only because everyone else is doing it?”

“To really touch something, she is learning—the bark of a sycamore tree in the gardens; a pinned stag beetle in the Department of Etymology; the exquisitely polished interior of a scallop shell in Dr. Geffard’s workshop—is to love it.”

“Radio: it ties a million ears to a single mouth.”

“Doing nothing is as good as collaborating.”

“Sometimes the eye of a hurricane is the safest place to be.”

“He sweeps her hair back from her ears; he swings her above his head. He says she is his émerveillement. He says he will never leave her, not in a million years.”

“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!”

“The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the globe . . . The sea is only a receptacle for all the prodigious, supernatural things that exist inside it. It is only movement and love; it is the living infinite.”

“Every outcome has its cause, and every predicament has its solution.”

“Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.”

“To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air.”

“But God is only a white cold eye, a quarter-moon poised above the smoke, blinking, blinking, as the city is gradually pounded to dust.”

“Just when we think we have a system,… the system collapses. Just when we know our way around, we get lost. Just when we think we know what's coming next, everything changes.”

“A scientist’s work is determined by two things: his interests and those of his time. Everything has led to this.”

“There are, he assures her, no such things as curses. There is luck, maybe, bad or good. A slight inclination of each day towards success or failure. But no curses.”

“A shell screams over the house. He thinks: I only want to sit here with her for a thousand hours.”

“Why else do any of this if not to become who we want to be?”

“Who knew love could kill you?”

“The moon sets and the eastern sky lightens, the hem of night pulling away, taking stars with it one by one until only two are left.”

“To shut you eyes is to guess nothing of blindness.”