Anthony Doerr Quotes

He could see tiny particles of dust drifting in the air between her ankles, each fleck tumbling individually in and out of the sunlight, and there was something intensely familiar in their arrangement.

Does not want to decide. They visit Scotland, New York City, Santiago. More than once they put on winter coats and visit the moon. "Can't you feel how lightweight we are, Marie? You can move by hardly twitching a muscle!" He sets her in his wheeled desk chair and pants as he whirls her in circles until she cannot laugh anymore for the pain of it.

A real diamond is never perfect.

See obstacles as opportunities. See obstacles as inspiration.

Rome is a broken mirror, the falling straps of a dress, a puzzle of astonishing complexity. It is an iceberg floating below our terrace, all its ballasts hidden beneath the surface.

Where do memories go once we've lost our ability to summon them? It

They say, Disgrace is not to fall but to lie. They

I found my first novel difficult. I don't want to make it sound like it's any more difficult than driving a cab or going to any other job, but there are so many opportunities for self-doubt, that you just kind of need to soldier on.

It's that history is whatever the victors say it is. That's the lesson. Whoever wins, that's who decides the history.

Memories cartwheel out of her head & tumble across the floor.

Here comes the light, nameless and intangible, streaming 93 million unobstructed miles through the implacable black vacuum to break itself against a wall, a cornice, a column. It drenches, it crenellates, it textures, It throws the city into relief. The coins fall through the slot; the illumination box clicks on.

Herr Siedler smiles as if to say: You and I, son, we know history takes a longer course, don't we?

He says there are sixty-five million specimens in this place, and if you have the right teacher, each can be as interesting as the last.

The fires pool and strut; they flow up the sides of the ramparts like tides; they splash into alleys, over rooftops, through a carpark. Smoke chases dust; ash chases smoke. A newsstand floats, burning.

It took me about three years to write About Grace. I wasn't teaching two of those years, so I was working eight-hour days, five days a week. And it would include research and reading - it wasn't just a blank page, laying down words.

German sailors sing a drunken song in the street, and a house spider over the stove spins a new web every night, and to Marie-Laure this is a double cruelty: that everything else keeps living, that the spinning earth does not pause for even an instant in its trip around the sun.

Somwhere across town she was standing at a sink or walking into a closet, his name stowed somewhere in the pleated neurons of her brain, echoing up one dendrite in a billion: David, David.

A good journal entry- like a good song, or sketch, or photograph- ought to break up the habitual and life away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought to be a love letter to the world.

electrons, the signal chain like a path through a crowded city,

benediction. Below the window, on one of the bastioned

Werner and his younger sister, Jutta, are raised at Children's House, a clinker-brick two-story orphanage on Viktoriastrasse whose rooms are populated with the coughs of sick children and the crying of newborns and battered trunks inside which drowse the last possessions of deceased parents: patchwork dresses, tarnished wedding cutlery, faded ambrotypes of fathers swallowed by the mines.

You have to trust someone sometime.

In the stories after the war, all the resistance heroes were dashing, sinewy types who could construct machine guns from paperclips. And the Germans either raised their godlike blond heads through open tank hatches to watch broken cities scroll past, or else were psychopathic, sex-crazed torturers of beautiful Jewesses. Where did the boy fit in? He made such a faint presence. It was like being in the room with a feather. But his soul glowed with some fundamental kindness, didn't it?

Every thirty-one hundred years a volume of water equivalent to all the oceans passed through the atmosphere.

This, perhaps, is how lives are measured, a series of abandonments that we hope beyond reason will eventually be reconciled.

Here was the worst curse: he managed to force the dream from his conscious mind often enough that when it returned to him (opening the pantry door, say, recalling the sweep of floodwater), the experience of it became fresh and bleeding once more.

Hadn't the actors acted of their own volition?

He thought he might say more, but something in her face had closed off, and the opportunity passed.

From outside comes a light tinkling, fragments of glass, perhaps, falling into the streets. It sounds both beautiful and strange, as though gemstones were raining from the sky.

Dust floats through the feeble beam of the flashlight: ten thousand particles, turning softly, twinkling.

Over time his images of the baby, like photographs handled too often, had worn down and creased, lost their definition.

The upperclassman hands over a third pail. "Throw it," commands Bastian. The night steams, the stars burn, the prisoner sways, the boys watch, the commandant tilts his head. Frederick pours the water onto the ground. "I will not.

But to raise one's hopes is to risk their falling further.

You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.

his heart laced with regret.

One night he sits up. In cots around him are a few dozen sick or wounded. A warm September wind pours across the countryside and sets the walls of the tent rippling.

Werner's head swivels lightly on his neck. The wind is strong and gusting stronger, and the corners of the tent strain against their guy ropes, and where the flaps at the two ends come up, he can see trees buck and sway. Everything rustles. Werner zips his old notebook and the little house into his duffel and the man beside him murmurs questions to himself and the rest of the ruined company sleeps. Even Werner's thirst has faded. He feels only the raw, impassive surge of the moonlight as it strikes the tent above him and scatters. Out there, through the open flaps of the tent, clouds hurtle above treetops. Toward Germany, toward home.

Silver and blue, blue and silver.

Sheets of paper tumble down the rows of cots, and in Werner's chest comes a quickening. He sees Frau Elena kneel beside the coal stove and bank up the fire. Children in their beds. Baby Jutta sleeps in her cradle. His father lights a lamp, steps into an elevator, and disappears.

The voice of Volkheimer: What you could be.

Werner's body seems to have gone weightless under his blanket, and beyond the flapping tent doors, the trees dance and the clouds keep up their huge billowing march, and he swings first one leg and then the other off the edge of the bed.

"Ernst," says the man beside

But minds are not to be trusted. Minds are always drifting toward ambiguity, toward questions, when what you really need is certainty. Purpose. Clarity. Do not trust your minds.

The Americans fished on, not hoping for much anymore, perhaps for a miracle, searching for small things to be happy about, because they were Americans and this was what their upbringings had taught them to do. They found a brief happiness, for example, in the potato chips that came to their rooms on expensive china and in the genuinely hopeful way the hotel girl asked if they'd had any luck. They took pleasure in their morning calls to the Lufthansa man, his wriggly explanations for the canceled flights to Norway. They smiled at the way a church had been built so the setting sun hit it high and perfect and orange, and the way they could follow the river to a park where miniskirted women lay in the grass with headphones clamped over their ears, and even at the way the little student-girls came filing down at noon behind their English-teaching beauty to call them fools.

Now it is as if she can hear the pendulum in the air in front of her: that huge golden bob, as wide across as a barrel, swinging on and on, never stopping. Grooving and regrooving its inhuman truth into the floor.

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.

How? How did Jutta understand so much more about how the world worked? While he knew so little?

The sky a pit of violet, edged with black.

I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff.

We return to the places we're from; we trample faded corners and pencil in new lines.

In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.

As if the imminent could not wait to become the past, or the present lunged at the future, eager for what would be.

There is pride, too, though - pride that he has done it alone. That his daughter is so curious, so resilient. There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing. That's how it feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing her hair: as though his love for his daughter will outstrip the limits of his body. The walls could fall away, even the whole city, and the brightness of that feeling would not wane. The drain moans; the cluttered house crowds in close.

To really touch something, is to love it.

All your life you wait, and then it finally comes, and are you ready?

Silence is the fruit of occupation.

...to write a story is to inch backward and forward along a series of planks you are cantilevering out into the darkness, plank by plank, inch by inch, and the best you can hope is that each day you find yourself a little bit farther out over the abyss.

She says, "Good.

Werner turns the fine-tune dial fractionally, and abruptly the voice booms into his ears, Dvee-nat-set, shayst-nat-set, davt-set-adeen, nonsense, terrible nonsense, pipelined directly into his head; it's like reaching into a sack full of cotton and finding a razor blade inside, everything constant and undeviating and then that one dangerous thing, so sharp you can hardly feel it open your skin.

Rumour,Light,Air

Von Rumpel laughs. He appreciates that they are trying to play the game. But don't they understand that the winner has already been determined? He

What light shines at night! He never knew. Light will blind him.

Stick-thin, alabaster-pale Etienne LeBlanc runs down the rue de Dinan with Madame Ruelle, the baker's wife, on his heels: the least-robust rescue ever assembled.

The urge to know scrapes against the inability to know.

At night she'd close her eyes and imagine: over a hundred million billion insects hatching and dying every year - all those bristling, pointed, winged lifetimes: murderers and egg raiders, cooperators and queens. There were the glamorous dragonflies and fearsome widows; slave-holding ants; migrating monarchs; the delicate mantid chewing down her lover; dragonflies making love at thirty miles an hour - all the flagships of entomology. But

He was failing at everything important. A room away his daughter was sitting with her face in her hands and he could not go to her.

Her fingers walk the tightropes of sentences;

something so single-minded. Never has he felt such a hunger to belong. In the rows of dormitories are cadets who talk of alpine skiing, of duels, of jazz clubs and governesses and boar hunting; boys who employ curse words with virtuosic skill and boys who talk about cigarettes named for cinema stars; boys who speak of "telephoning the colonel" and boys who have baronesses for mothers.

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? He

They go down the ladder and clamber out through the wardrobe. No soldiers wait in the hall with guns drawn. Nothing seems different at all. 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. Etienne laughs as though to himself. "Do you remember what Madame said about the boiling frog?" "Yes, Uncle." "I wonder, who was supposed to be the frog? Her? Or the Germans?

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.

Lord Our God Your Grace is a purifying fire.

Fifteen and a half years as incontestable, a continent he'd never visit, a staircase he'd never climb.

If your same blood doesn't run in the arms and legs of the person you're next to, you can't trust anything.

Not-knowing is always more thrilling than knowing. Not-knowing is where hope and art and possibility and invention come from. It is not-knowing, that old, old thing, that allows everything to be renewed.

Everyone should behave as if he carries the real thing.

ANTHONY DOERR is the author of the story collections Memory Wall and The Shell Collector, the novel About Grace, and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome. He has won numerous prizes both in the United States and overseas, including four O. Henry Prizes, three Pushcart Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, the National Magazine Award for fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Story Prize. Raised in Cleveland, Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons.

father shoves things into what

He made her the glowing hot center of his life; he made her feel as if every step she took was important.

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.

There are none so distant that fate cannot bring them together.

What you could be.

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

Papa, it's too expesive.'
' That's for me to worry about.

They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.

There was our old life, in the apartment, in which we had time to finish most of the tasks we started and took long showers and remembered to water our plants. And there was our new life, in the hospital a mile away, in which Shauna needed morphine and two babies needed to eat every three hours around the clock ... I remember thinking, we're going to have to figure out how to combine our old life with our new life ... Over a year later, we still have days of mind-crushing fatigue, midnights when I think I'm pouring milk into a bottle but am actually pouring it all over the counter. Yesterday I spent five minutes trying to remember my parents' zip code. But now there are mornings like this one, when we wake up and realize we've slept through the entire night, and we stroll through the gardens as if we are normal again, as if we are finally learning the syllables of this strange, new language.

It's as if the city has become a library of books in an unknown language, the houses great shelves of illegible volumes, the lamps all extinguished.

The weather in this place: you can feel it between your fingers.

Harold Bazin loves to talk

What the war did to dreamers.

single candle. He slides the jack under

He marveled at the indifference of the world, the way it kept on, despite everything.

I wasn't trying to reach England. or Paris. I thought that if I made the broadcast powerful enough, my brother would hear me. That I could bring him some peace, protect him as he had always protected me."

You'd play your brother's own voice to him? After he died?"

"And Debussy."

Did he ever talk back?"

The attic ticks. What ghosts sidle along the walls right now, trying to overhear? She can almost taste her great-uncle's fright in the air.

"No," he says. "He never did.

But the huge bowl of the sky remains untracked: no zeppelins, no bombers, no superhuman paratroopers, just the last songbirds returning from their winter homes, and the quicksilver winds of spring transmuting into the heavier, greener breezes of summer.

Stones are just stones and rain is just rain and misfortune is just bad luck.

Now the piano makes a long, familiar run, the pianist playing different scales with each hand
what sounds like three hands, four
the harmonies like steadily thickening peals on a strand, and Werner sees six-year-old Jutta lean toward him, Frau Elena kneading bread in the background, a crystal radio in his lap, the cords of his soul not yet severed.

Late-night shortwave: province of ramblers and dreamers, madmen and ranters.

They clomp together through the narrow streets, Marie-Laure's hand on the back of Madame's apron, following the odors of her stews and cakes; in such moments Madame seems like a great moving wall of rosebushes, thorny and fragrant and crackling with bees. Still-warm

In the dormitory window one night, Frederick rest his forehead against the glass. "I hate them. I hate them for that.

We serve the Reich, Pfennig. It does not serve us.

For Werner, doubts turn up regularly. Racial purity, political purity - Bastian speaks to a horror of any sort of corruption, and yet, Werner wonders in the dead of night, 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. Each bite of food, each particle of light entering the eye - the body can never be pure. But this is what the commandant insists upon, why the Reich measures their noses, clocks their hair color. The entropy of a closed system never decreases.

For me it was perfect, because it wasn't a very competitive environment, and it was a studio program. They basically send you off, and say, bring us some work, and we'll help you improve it. It really rewarded self-discipline.

A scientist's work, cadet, is determined by two things. His interests and the interests of his time. Do

He and Werner eat their first meal in their starchy new uniforms at a long wooden table in the refectory. Some boys talk in whispers, some sit alone, some gulp food as if they have not eaten in days. Through three arched windows, dawn sends a sheaf of hallowed golden rays. Frederick flutters his fingers and asks, "Do you like birds?" "Sure." "Do you know about hooded crows?

One section of the old city, tucked against the western walls, becomes a firestorm in which the spires of flames, at their highest, reach three hundred feet. The appetite for oxygen is such that objects heavier than housecats are dragged into the flames.

Artillery has stopped for the moment, and the predawn fires inside the walls take on a steady middle life, an adulthood.