Anthony Doerr citations

“land mines explode in front”

“Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune.”

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

“A real diamond is never perfect.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”