Quotes by Anthony Doerr

“There has always been a sliver of panic in him, deeply buried, when it comes to his daughter: a fear that he is no good as a father, that he is doing everything wrong. That he never quite understoo...”

“Whenever he can, Werner records what the partisans say on magnetic tape. Everybody, he is learning, likes to hear themselves talk. Hubris, like the oldest stories. They raise the antenna too high, ...”

“Life is wonderful and strange...and it’s also absolutely mundane and tiresome. It’s hilarious and it’s deadening. It’s a big, screwed-up morass of beauty and change and fear and all our lives we os...”

“Winkler's breath plumed up onto his glasses. The entire valley was enveloped in a huge, illuminated stillness. Above him the clouds had pulled away and the sky burned with stars. The meadow smolder...”

“You must never stop believing. That’s the most important thing.”

“Did time move forward, through people, or did people move through it, like clouds across the sky?”

“Every hour, Robert thinks, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying te...”

“Memory builds itself without any clean or objective logic: a dot here, another dot here, and plenty of dark spaces in between. What we know is always evolving, always subdividing. Remember a memory...”

“Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitary”

“I think about how Grandpa Z says the sky is blue because it's dusty and octopuses can unscrew the tops off jars and starfish have eyes at the tips of their arms. I think: No matter what happens, no...”

“Don't tell me how to grieve. Don't tell me ghosts fade away eventually, like they do in movies, waving goodbye with see-through hands. Lots of things fade away but ghosts like these don't, heartbre...”

“The stars were so many and so white they looked like chips of ice, hammered through the fabric of the sky.”

“Then help us.”“I don’t want to make trouble, Madame.”“Isn’t doing nothing a kind of troublemaking?”“Doing nothing is doing nothing.”“Doing nothing is as good as collaborating.” …“It’s not a person ...”

“I’m thankful that everything sweet is sweet because it is finite.”

“---on her best days, she glimpses the limitless span of millennia behind her: millions of years, tens of millions.”

“How about peaches, dear?” murmurs Madame Manec, and Marie-Laure can hear a can opening, juice slopping into a bowl. Seconds later, she’s eating wedges of wet sunlight.”

“And the skies: in one day the sky could travel from green at dawn to a noon-time blue so severe it was almost black to hot silver in the afternoon to roiling burgundy at sunset. Just before night i...”