Quotes from book

All the Light We Cannot See

“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.”

“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.”

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

“What the war did to dreamers.”

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

“Doing nothing is as good as collaborating.”

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

“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!”

“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.”

“We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.”

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

“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.”

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

“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?”

“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.”