Anthony Doerr citations

Page 2

“land mines explode in front”

“Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.”

“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.”

“all I feel sure of are questions.”