Anthony Doerr: Trending quotes (page 2)

“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.”

“… the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”