Anthony Doerr: Trending quotes

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Memories cartwheel out of her head & tumble across the floor.”

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

“So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?”

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

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

“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?”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”