Anthony Doerr Quotes

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Quotes About Anthony Doerr

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We return to the places we're from; we trample faded corners and pencil in new lines. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
should be a wall, her hands find ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
Werner thinks of her, whether he wishes to or not. Girl with a cane, girl in a gray dress, girl made of mist. That air of otherworldliness in the snarls of her hair and the fearlessness of her step. She takes up residence inside him, a living doppelgänger to face down the dead Viennese girl who haunts him every night. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
Live faithfully, fight bravely, and die laughing. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
How wonderful it is to by my age - our age - and learn you were wrong about such a fundamental thing. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
Why doesn't glue stick to the inside of the bottle, Frau Elena? ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
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. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
Assume the world offers safety and rationality when of course it does not. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
The air between them seemed to accumulate energy. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
(Rome) is a Metropolitan Museum of Art the size of Manhattan, no roof, no display cases, and half a million combustion engines rumbling in the hallways. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
your same blood doesn't run in the arms and legs of the person you're next to, you can't trust anything. And even then. It's not ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
Hope was a sunrise, a friend in the alley, a whisper in an empty corridor. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
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 oscillate between awe and tedium. I think stories are the place to explore that inherent weirdness; that movement from the fantastic to the prosaic that is life....

What interests me - and interests me totally - is how we as living human beings can balance the brief, warm, intensely complicated fingersnap of our lives against the colossal, indifferent, and desolate scales of the universe. Earth is four-and-a-half billion years old. Rocks in your backyard are moving if you could only stand still enough to watch. You get hernias because, eons ago, you used to be a fish. So how in the world are we supposed to measure our lives - which involve things like opening birthday cards, stepping on our kids' LEGOs, and buying toilet paper at Safeway - against the absolutely incomprehensible vastness of the universe?

How? We stare into the fire. We turn to friends, bartenders, lovers, priests, drug-dealers, painters, writers. Isn't that why we seek each other out, why people go to churches and temples, why we read books? So that we can find out if life occasionally sets other people trembling, too? ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
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. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
Werner sleeps in a tiny dormitory with seven other fourteen-year-olds. The bunk above belongs to Frederick: a reedy boy, thin as a blade of grass, skin as pale as cream. Frederick is new too. He's from Berlin. His father is assistant to an ambassador. When Frederick speaks, his attention floats up, as though he's scanning the sky for something. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
The year swung past the fulcrum of another equinox. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
that a thousand choices were implicit in a single moment. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
We serve the Reich, Pfennig. It does not serve us. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
He waits a long time. The captain reviews the fingernails ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
If your same blood doesn't run in the arms and legs of the person you're next to, you can't trust anything. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
What does he remember? He saw the engineer Bernd close the cellar door and sit on the stairs. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
Lately the commandant speaks more and more intimately of the führer and the latest thing- prayers, petroleum, loyalty- that he requires. The führer requires trustworthiness, electricity, boot leather. Werner is beginning to see, approaching his sixteenth birthday, that what the führer really requires is boys. Great rows of them walking to the conveyor belt to climb on. Give up cream for the führer, sleep for the führer, aluminum for the führer. Give up Reinhard Wöhlmann's father and Karl Westerholzer's father and Martin Burkhard's father. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
How? How did Jutta understand so much more about how the world worked? While he knew so little? ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
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. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
Doesn't look like much, does he?" murmurs Frederick. "Hardly a couple of ounces of feathers and bones. But that bird can fly to Africa and back. Powered by bugs and worms and desire."
The wagtail hops from twig to twig. Werner rubs his aching eyes. It's just a bird.
"Ten thousand years ago," whispers Frederick, "they came through here in the millions. When this place was a garden, one endless garden from end to end. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
A memory rises: Etienne was in a field east of the city with his brother. It was the summer when fireflies showed up in Saint-Malo, and their father was very excited, building long-handled nets for the boys and giving them jars with wire to fasten over the tops, and Etienne and Henri raced through the tall grass as the fireflies floated away from them, illuming on and off, always seeming to rise just beyond their reach, as if the earth were smoldering and these were sparks that their footfalls had prodded free. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
The eggs taste like clouds. Like spun gold. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
The vice minister's wife sits so upright that it seems as if her spine is hewn from oak. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
The mind craves ease; it encourages the senses to recognize symbols, to gloss. It makes maps of our kitchen drawers and neighborhood streets; it fashions a sort of algebra out of life. And this is useful, even essential - X is the route to work, Y is the heft and feel of a nickel between your fingers. Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We'd pass out every time we saw - actually saw- a flower. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
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. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It's wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
She shakes the little house, though she knows it will not give itself away. He went back for it. Carried it out. Died with it. What sort of a boy was he? She remembers how he sat and paged through that book of Etienne's. Birds, he said. Bird after bird after bird. She sees herself walk out of the smoking city, trailing a white pillowcase. Once she is out of his sight, he turns and lets himself back through Hubert Bazin's gate. The rampart a huge crumbling bulwark above him. The sea settling on the far side of the grate. She sees him solve the puzzle of the little house. Maybe he drops the diamond into the pool among the thousands of snails. Then he closes the puzzle box and locks the gate and trots away. Or he puts the stone back into the house. Or slips it into his pocket. From her memory, Dr. Geffard whispers: That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much. Only the strongest people can turn away from feelings like that. She twists the chimney ninety degrees. It turns as smoothly as if her father just built it. When she tries to slide off the first of the three wooden roof panels, she finds it stuck. But with the end of a pen, she manages to lever off the panels one two three. Something drops into her palm. An iron key. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
[Time is] a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working hard not to spill one single drop. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
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. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
To men like that, time was a surfeit, a barrel they watched slowly drain. When really, he thinks, it's a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
Speed, to hear their skates clapping along, then ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
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. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
had felt time settle over itself, imbricate and fix into place the vertigo of future aligning with the present. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
The grotto itself comprises its own slick universe, and inside this universe spin countless galaxies: here, in the upturned half of a single mussel shell, lives a barnacle and a tiny spindle shell occupied by a still smaller hermit crab. And on the shell of the crab? A yet smaller barnacle. And on that barnacle? ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
What mazes there are in this world. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
A scientist's work is determined by two things: his interests and those of his time. Everything has led to this. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
tanks and trucks over the same roads, ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
What I want to write about today is the sea. It contains so many colors. Silver at dawn, green at noon, dark blue in the evening. Sometimes it looks almost red. Or it will turn the color of old coins. Right now the shadows of clouds are dragging across it, and patches of sunlight are touching down everywhere. White strings of gulls drag over it like beads. It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
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. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
benediction. Below the window, on one of the bastioned ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
Marie-Laure is glad to hear a smile enter his voice. But beneath it she can sense his thoughts fluttering like trapped birds. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
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. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
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. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
But over these past few weeks, her existence has become tolerable. At least, out on the beaches, her privation and fear are rinsed away by wind and color and light. Most ~ Anthony Doerr
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Frederick's dreaminess, his otherness - it's on him like a scent, and everyone can smell it. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
To know her is to realize the thousand forms of inquiry. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
Artillery has stopped for the moment, and the predawn fires inside the walls take on a steady middle life, an adulthood. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
It was not,' said Jutta, reaching the limits of her French, 'very easy to be good then. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
Bernd molders in the corner. Jutta moves through the world somewhere, watching shadows disentangle themselves from night, watching minders limp past in the dawnn. It was enough when Werner was a boy, wasn't it? A world of wildflowers blooming up through the shapes of rusty cast-off parts. A world of berries and carrot peels ad Frau Elena's fairy tales. Of the sharp smell of tar, and trains passing, and a voice on the radio offering a loom on which to spin his dreams. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
The years passed as clouds do, ephemeral and vaporous, condensing, sliding along awhile, then dispersing like ghosts. ~ Anthony Doerr
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The moonlight shines and billows; the broken clouds scud above the trees. Leaves fly everywhere. But the moonlight stays unmoved by the wind, passing through clouds, through air, in what seems to Werner like impossibly slow imperturbable rays. They hang across the buckling grass. Why doesn't the wind move the light? ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
Fifteen and a half years as incontestable, a continent he'd never visit, a staircase he'd never climb. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
Hadn't the actors acted of their own volition? ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor
it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
War is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity: chocolate or bullets or parachute silk. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
We're in Borneo, can't you tell? We're skimming the treetops now, big leaves are glimmering below us, and there are coffee bushes over there, smell them? and Marie-Laure will indeed smell something, whether because her uncle is passing coffee grounds beneath her nose, or because they really are flying over the coffee trees of Borneo, she does not want to decide. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
the voice seems to echo in the architecture of his head ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
You must never stop believing. That's the most important thing. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
electrons, the signal chain like a path through a crowded city, ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
Behind her leg a shy little girl - Grace - smiling up. "Dad?" It was a kind hope. But his dreams spoke to none of that: when he slept he dreamt of darkness, or of people he did not recognize, or of water closing slowly, almost gratefully, over his head. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
This was a life, this was how people chose to live? Somewhere inside she could feel winds dying, the gales of her youth stifled. She was learning that in her life everything - health, happiness, even love - was subject to the landscape; the weathers of the world were inseparable from the weathers of her soul. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
The dreams had ceased coming, as they often did, retreating somewhere else for years, until another event of sufficient significance neared, and the patterns of circumstance dragged them to the surface again. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
Does she grieve over his absence? Or has she calcified her feelings, protected herself, as he is learning to do? ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
They sleep despite noise, despite cold, despite hunger, as though desperate to stay removed from the waking world for as long as possible. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
The girl sits very still in the corner and wraps her coat around her knees. The way she tucks her ankles up against her bottom. The way her fingers flutter through the space around her. Each a thing he hopes never to forget. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
The quiet is fretful, unnatural. It's what a mouse must feel as it steps from its hole and into the open blades of a meadow, never knowing what shadow might come cruising above. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
Too cold even to snow - that winter presents a strange and haunted season during which Werner prowls the static like he used to prowl the alleys with Jutta, pulling her in the wagon through the colonies of Zollverein. A voice materializes out of the distortion in his headphones, then fades, and he goes ferreting after it. There, thinks Werner when he finds it again, there: a feeling like shutting your eyes and feeling your way down a mile-long thread until your fingernails find the tiny lump of a knot. Sometimes days pass after hearing a first transmission before Werner snares the next; they present a problem to solve, something to wrap his mind around: better, surely, than fighting in some ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
There are ninety-six thousand kilometers of blood vessels in the human body, children! Almost enough to wind around the earth two and a half times . . . ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
Whose sisters listen to foreign radio stations? The woman ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
Travel definitely affects me as a writer. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
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? ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
Over time his images of the baby, like photographs handled too often, had worn down and creased, lost their definition. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
He laughs a pure, contagious laugh, one she will try to remember all her life, ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
I went to Europe three times, I read dozens and dozens of books, I studied thousands of photos. But I always supplemented that research with imagination; research might give you detail, but imagination supplies the direction in which to apply all that detail. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
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. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
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. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
All your life you wait, and then it finally comes, and are you ready? ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
I saved her only to hear her die. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
Twenty thousand days and nights in one place, each layered and trapped and folded on top of the last, the creases in her hands, the aches between her vertebrae. Embryo, seed coat, endosperm: What is a seed if not the purest kind of memory, a link to every generation that has gone before it? ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
Maybe the idea was that he could write so many letters, deliver so many envelopes back to Sandy, eventually he'd have sent all of himself, and could exist more there than he did here. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
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. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
The dead are gone and so their power over the living is only temporary. You lose sleep, you lose appetite, but eventually you fall asleep and eventually you eat - you may hate yourself for it, but the body's demands are incontrovertible. He had always felt guilt about that, that he went on living... p 115 ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
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 ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
Wherever her great-uncle is, could he have survived this?
Could anyone?
Has she? (96) ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
he could feel his hope wilting. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
The window glows. The slow sandy light of dawn permeates the room. Everything transient and aching; everything tentative. To be here, in this room, high in this house, out of the cellar, with her: it is like medicine. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
Why, Esther wonders, do any of us believe our lives lead outward through time? How do we know we aren't continually traveling inward, toward our centers? Because this is how it feels to Esther when she sits on her deck in Geneva, Ohio, in the last spring of her life; it feels as if she is being drawn down some path that leads deeper inside, toward a miniature, shrouded, final kingdom that has waited within her all along. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
Is it right," Jutta says, "to do something only because everyone else is doing it? ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
A fourth door, and a fifth, on and on until you reach a thirteenth, a little locked door no bigger than a shoe." The children lean forward. "And then?" "Behind the thirteenth door" - the guide flourishes one of his impossibly wrinkled hands - "is the Sea of Flames." Puzzlement. Fidgeting. "Come now. You've never heard of the Sea of Flames? ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
See obstacles as opportunities. See obstacles as inspiration. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
There are none so distant that fate cannot bring them together. ~ Anthony Doerr
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But on most days, especially the warm ones, life exhausts him; the worsening traffic and graffiti and company politics, everyone grousing about bonuses, benefits, overtime. Sometimes in the slow heat of summer, long before dawn, Volkheimer paces in the harsh dazzle of the billboard light and feels his loneliness on him like a disease. ~ Anthony Doerr
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He thought he might say more, but something in her face had closed off, and the opportunity passed. ~ Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr quotes by Anthony Doerr
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