Top 100 Anthony Doerr Quotes
#1. 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.
Anthony Doerr
#2. Beach. Everyone who can must work to strengthen
Anthony Doerr
#3. purposefully in twos and threes into the streets:
Anthony Doerr
#4. Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.
Anthony Doerr
#5. Is she happy? For portions of every day, she is happy.
Anthony Doerr
#6. The despair doesn't last. Marie-Laure is too young and her father is too patient.
Anthony Doerr
#7. Any moment, it seemed, something could tear the sky and whatever was on the other sides would push through.
Anthony Doerr
#8. See obstacles as opportunities. See obstacles as inspiration.
Anthony Doerr
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. With the countless chevrons of whitecaps. Soon enough, the navigators can discern the low moonlit lumps of islands ranged along the horizon. France.
Anthony Doerr
#12. What does he remember? He saw the engineer Bernd close the cellar door and sit on the stairs.
Anthony Doerr
#13. 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.
Anthony Doerr
#16. Potatoes at six o'clock, Marie. Mushrooms at three. Now?
Anthony Doerr
#17. Whose sisters listen to foreign radio stations? The woman
Anthony Doerr
#18. But curses are not real. Earth is all magma and continental crust and ocean. Gravity and time. Isn't it?
Anthony Doerr
#19. The very life of any creature is a quick-fading spark in fathomless darkness.
Anthony Doerr
#20. He thought he might say more, but something in her face had closed off, and the opportunity passed.
Anthony Doerr
#21. It's 1940 and no one laughs at the Hitler Youth now.
Anthony Doerr
#22. Even the banana plantations, the big, hardy trees on the flanks of Mount St. Andrew, seemed to lilt and acquiesce in the heat.
Anthony Doerr
#23. Late-night shortwave: province of ramblers and dreamers, madmen and ranters.
Anthony Doerr
#24. It was not,' said Jutta, reaching the limits of her French, 'very easy to be good then.
Anthony Doerr
#25. There are comforts in knowing the boundaries of the place you live. Everyone here seems to behave like things are endless.
Anthony Doerr
#26. The network of trenches and artillery below shows itself very clearly for a moment, and Werner feels he is gazing down into the circuitry of an enormous radio, each soldier down there an electron flowing single file down his own electrical path, with no more say in the matter than an electron has.
Anthony Doerr
#27. chicken eggs sell for two million reichsmarks apiece, and rheumatic fever stalks Children's House like a wolf. There is no butter or meat. Fruit is a memory.
Anthony Doerr
#28. Who will lie on her back and let her last breath curl up to the ceiling as a curse upon the invaders.
Anthony Doerr
#29. The bony figure of Death rides the streets below, stopping his mount now and then to peer into windows. Horns of fire on his head and smoke leaking from his nostrils and, in his skeletal hand, a list of newly charged with addresses.
Anthony Doerr
#30. The future waited for him to keep his appointment.
Anthony Doerr
#32. 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
#34. (The) Gray wagtail ... doesn't look like much, does he? 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.
Anthony Doerr
#35. We are dust only after all our water evaporates.
Anthony Doerr
#36. The war drops its question mark. Memos are distributed. The collections must be protected. A small cadre of couriers has begun moving things to country estates. Locks and keys are in greater demand than ever.
Anthony Doerr
#38. Nothing that could fit on this page, or a hundred of these pages, would possibly accommodate all the things I should say to you, all the things you deserve to hear.
Anthony Doerr
#39. 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
#41. Maybe the Sea of Flames never existed at all, maybe curses aren't real, maybe her father is right: Earth is all magma and continental crust and ocean. Gravity and time. Stones are just stones and rain is just rain and misfortune is just bad
Anthony Doerr
#42. This is not real suffering, she tells herself. this is only a matter of reprogramming her picture of the future. Of understanding that the line of descendancy is not continuous but arbitrary.
Anthony Doerr
#43. This is life, he thinks, this is why we live, to play like this on a day when winter is finally releasing its grip.
Anthony Doerr
#45. But what was family? Surely more than genes, eye color, flesh. Family was story: truth and struggle and retribution. Family was time. If he had learned anything it was the family was not so much what you were given as what you were able to maintain.
Anthony Doerr
#47. It is not so much the science of snow for me, anymore. I'd rather just look at it. The light, the way it absorbs sound. The way we feel as if the more that falls, the more we are forgiven.
Anthony Doerr
#48. War is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity: chocolate or bullets or parachute silk.
Anthony Doerr
#49. What light shines at night! He never knew. Light will blind him.
Anthony Doerr
#50. In the infinite permutation of an ice crystal, everything repeats itself, but, really, from another point of view, nothing repeats itself.
Anthony Doerr
#51. 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.
Anthony Doerr
#52. But the cracks were splitting, finding power, thickening into chasms.
Anthony Doerr
#53. Below shows itself very clearly for a moment, and
Anthony Doerr
#54. It becomes known as the time of the ostriches. "Do we have our heads in the sand, Madame? Or do they?" "Maybe everybody does," she murmurs. Madame
Anthony Doerr
#55. It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.
Anthony Doerr
#56. You must never stop believing. That's the most important thing.
Anthony Doerr
#57. To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air.
Anthony Doerr
#58. Between them was fifteen or so feet of frozen space, bounded by his window and hers, but it was as if the windows had liquefied, or else the air had, and his vision skewed and rippled and it was all he could do to put the Newport into gear and ease forward to let the next car in.
Anthony Doerr
#59. Parisian cousins nobody has heard from in decades now write letters begging for capons, hams, hens. The dentist is selling wine through the mail.
Anthony Doerr
#60. How much easier it would have been if he and Sandy could have fought: a skirmish in the night, some harsh words, some measure of the truth actually spoken aloud.
Anthony Doerr
#61. All of it burning. Every memory he ever made. Above Fort National, the dawn becomes deeply, murderously clear. The Milky Way a fading river. He looks across to the fires. He thinks: The universe is full of fuel.
Anthony Doerr
#62. 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
#63. Look closely and the picturesque inevitably cracks apart and becomes more interesting.
Anthony Doerr
#64. benediction. Below the window, on one of the bastioned
Anthony Doerr
#66. It wasn't until I was 26 or 25 when I started sending work out to magazines.
Anthony Doerr
#67. Every part of him wants to scream: is this not wrong? But here it is right.
Anthony Doerr
#68. All summer the smells of nettles and daisies and rainwater purl through the gardens.
Anthony Doerr
#69. A single bed with blood in it. Blood on the pillow and on the sheets and even on the enameled metal of the bed frame. Pink rags in a basin. Half-unrolled bandage on the floor. The nurse bustles over and grimaces at Werner. Outside of the kitchens, she is the only woman at the school.
Anthony Doerr
#71. She has no memories of her mother but imagines her as white, a soundless brilliance.
Anthony Doerr
#72. He waits a long time. The captain reviews the fingernails
Anthony Doerr
#73. the voice seems to echo in the architecture of his head
Anthony Doerr
#74. Whoever says adults are better at paying attention than children is wrong: we're too busying filtering out the world, focusing on some task or another, paying no attention. Our kids are the ones discovering new contents all day long.
Anthony Doerr
#76. Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience
buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello
become new all over again.
Anthony Doerr
#78. All month the ice muttered and howled and whistled. The trees echoed back and forth among themselves. Taken collectively, the sound was of deep wounding, of winter inexorably taking the life out of things.
Anthony Doerr
#79. 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
#80. Hope was a sunrise, a friend in the alley, a whisper in an empty corridor.
Anthony Doerr
#81. The city, thinks Marie-Laure, is slowly being remade into the model upstairs. Streets sucked empty one by one.
Anthony Doerr
#82. Marie-Laure drops her cane; she begins to cry. Her father lifts her, holds her to his narrow chest. "it's so big," she whispers. "You can do this, Marie." She cannot.
Anthony Doerr
#83. He'll say, You did this to me. Please. Not in front of my son.
Anthony Doerr
#85. I guess you could say I've been writing all my life.
Anthony Doerr
#86. 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
#87. Fifteen and a half years as incontestable, a continent he'd never visit, a staircase he'd never climb.
Anthony Doerr
#88. Sometimes the eye of a hurricane is the safest place to be.
Anthony Doerr
#89. These were the beginnings of a new existence; Winkler could feel it gestating.
Anthony Doerr
#91. Walk the paths of logic. Every outcome has its cause, and every predicament has its solution. Every lock its key.
Anthony Doerr
#93. 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
#94. Firelit rooms lined with books - these are the places in which important things happen.
Anthony Doerr
#95. Every thirty-one hundred years a volume of water equivalent to all the oceans passed through the atmosphere.
Anthony Doerr
#96. Your problem, Werner," says Frederick, "is that you still believe you own your life.
Anthony Doerr
#98. 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.
Anthony Doerr
#99. That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much. Only the strongest people can turn away from feelings like that.
Anthony Doerr
#100. the air would get so heavy with moisture he imagined he could feel each bloated molecule as it toppled into his lungs.
Anthony Doerr
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
