Quotes from book

All the Light We Cannot See

“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 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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“Some people are weak in some ways, sir. Others in other ways.”

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

“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.”

“Why else do any of this if not to become who we want to be?”

“Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.”

“Sometimes the eye of a hurricane is the safest place to be.”

“The way her fingers flutter through the space around her. Each a thing he hopes never to forget.”

“How do you ever know for certain that you are doing the right thing?”

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

“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.”

“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.”