Top 100 Anthony Doerr Quotes
#2. How few days are left in the lives of anyone. How few hours.
Anthony Doerr
#3. And yet she can tell he is visited by fears so immense, so multiple, that she can almost feel the terror pulsing inside him. As though some beast breathes all the time at the windowpanes of his mind.
Anthony Doerr
#4. My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.
Anthony Doerr
#5. There is only chance in this world, chance and physics.
Anthony Doerr
#7. Up and down the lanes, the last unevacuated townspeople wake, groan, sigh. Spinsters, prostitutes, men over sixty. Procrastinators, collaborators, disbelievers, drunks. Nuns of every order. The poor. The stubborn. The blind.
Anthony Doerr
#9. The bookseller said it's in two parts, and this is the first. I thought that next year, if we keep saving, we can get the second -
Anthony Doerr
#10. Time slows. The attic disappears. Jutta disappears. Has anyone ever spoken so intimately about the very things Werner is most curious about? Open
Anthony Doerr
#12. Marie-Laure says, I heard that the diamond is like a piece of light from the original world. Before it fell. A piece of light rained to earth from God.
Anthony Doerr
#13. Who had he been? A failed father, a runaway husband. A son. A packet of unopened letters. He was dead; he was dead.
Anthony Doerr
#14. Where," he asks, "is that book? The one with the birds? In the gold slipcover?
Anthony Doerr
#15. Realizes, is the basis of his fear, all fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark. Who built all of this,
Anthony Doerr
#16. It is nothing, Marie-Laure. Come now." Marie-Laure backs out. Below her, her great-uncle whispers nursery rhymes to himself. "I can sit with him for a bit, Madame. Maybe we could read some more of our
Anthony Doerr
#17. 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.
Anthony Doerr
#18. 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
#19. Beach. Everyone who can must work to strengthen
Anthony Doerr
#20. 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.
Anthony Doerr
#21. We live through books; we have adventures in them, we lead alternative lives through them. We expand our memories through them. And that sometimes art can offer us more intense experiences of the world than life itself can.
Anthony Doerr
#22. The big trunk of the umbrella pine looms outside the window, living its two lives - the upper world of needles and stems, the lower world of roots and soil.
Anthony Doerr
#23. Clair de Lune," a song that makes her think of leaves fluttering, and of the hard ribbons of sand beneath her feet at low tide. The music slinks and rises and settles back to earth,
Anthony Doerr
#24. purposefully in twos and threes into the streets:
Anthony Doerr
#25. Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.
Anthony Doerr
#26. Every cell in a dying body winks out at its own pace.
Anthony Doerr
#27. walls, the upturned cars, the barking dogs, the
Anthony Doerr
#28. 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.
Anthony Doerr
#29. The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light.
Anthony Doerr
#30. Is she happy? For portions of every day, she is happy.
Anthony Doerr
#31. It doesn't hurt, she explains. And there is no darkness, not the kind they imagine. Everything is composed of webs and lattices and upheavals of sound and texture.
Anthony Doerr
#32. The despair doesn't last. Marie-Laure is too young and her father is too patient.
Anthony Doerr
#33. Any moment, it seemed, something could tear the sky and whatever was on the other sides would push through.
Anthony Doerr
#34. Some people are weak in some ways, sir. Others in other ways.
Anthony Doerr
#35. He made her the glowing hot center of his life; he made her feel as if every step she took was important.
Anthony Doerr
#36. What do we call visible light? We call it color. But the electromagnetic spectrum runs to zero in one direction and infinity in the other, so really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.
Anthony Doerr
#37. Jutta drags herself closer; she watches her brother with outsize eyes. A piano chases the violins. Then woodwinds. The strings sprint, woodwinds fluttering behind. More instruments join in. Flutes? Harps? The song races, seems to loop back over itself. "Werner?" Jutta whispers. He blinks;
Anthony Doerr
#38. Over time his images of the baby, like photographs handled too often, had worn down and creased, lost their definition.
Anthony Doerr
#39. He blinks; he has to swallow back tears. The parlor
Anthony Doerr
#41. My sister-in-law is a painter, and I'll say, how long did it take you to paint that painting. She'll say, It took me maybe three days, but it took me all my life to get the skills to paint that painting.
Anthony Doerr
#42. 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
#43. Each minute that passes is one fewer in this house. In this life.
Anthony Doerr
#45. Why else do any of this if not to become who we want to be?
Anthony Doerr
#46. A foot of steel looks as if it has been transformed into warm butter and gouged by the fingers of a child,
Anthony Doerr
#47. 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.
Anthony Doerr
#48. the house seems the material equivalent of her uncle's inner being: apprehensive, isolated, but full of cobwebby wonders. In
Anthony Doerr
#49. What use are memories when memories can do little more than fade?
Anthony Doerr
#50. Posters go up in the market, on tree trunks in the Place Chateaubriand. Voluntary surrender of firearms. Anyone who does not cooperate will be shot.
Anthony Doerr
#51. Together, the unlikeliest of penitents, silently, grafting words to air, they sent their prayers into the room.
Anthony Doerr
#52. See obstacles as opportunities. See obstacles as inspiration.
Anthony Doerr
#53. It is the rarest thing ... that gets preserved, that does not get erased, broken down, transformed.
Anthony Doerr
#55. Why doesn't glue stick to the inside of the bottle, Frau Elena?
Anthony Doerr
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. The year swung past the fulcrum of another equinox.
Anthony Doerr
#59. He is a ghost. He is from some other world. He is Papa, Madame Manec, Etienne; he is everyone who has left her finally coming back.
Anthony Doerr
#60. First we die, the woman says. "Then our bodies are buried. So we die two deaths." "Then in another world, folded inside the living world, we wait. We wait until everyone who knew us when we were children has died. And then the last of them dies, we finally die our third death.
Anthony Doerr
#61. Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.
Anthony Doerr
#62. I always told my dad I'd play professional football.
Anthony Doerr
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. Radio: it ties a million ears to a single mouth.
Anthony Doerr
#66. What does he remember? He saw the engineer Bernd close the cellar door and sit on the stairs.
Anthony Doerr
#67. On the rue de la Crosse, the Hotel of Bees becomes almost weightless for a moment, lifted in a spiral of flame, before it begins to rain the pieces back to the earth
Anthony Doerr
#68. 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
#69. 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
#72. electrons, the signal chain like a path through a crowded city,
Anthony Doerr
#74. Potatoes at six o'clock, Marie. Mushrooms at three. Now?
Anthony Doerr
#75. Whose sisters listen to foreign radio stations? The woman
Anthony Doerr
#76. Before you eat, drink as much water as you can, and you will feel full more quickly.
Anthony Doerr
#77. He waits until dark. Marie-Laure sits in the mouth of the wardrobe, the false back open, and listens to her uncle switch on the microphone and the transmitter in the attic. His mild voice speaks numbers into the garret. Then music plays, soft and low, full of cellos tonight . . .
Anthony Doerr
#78. Nine herons stand like flowers in the canal beside the coking plant.
Anthony Doerr
#80. Always at the end they sit side by side again and pound the cushions, and slowly the room rematerializes around them. "Ah," he says, more quietly, his accent fading, the faintest touch of dread returning to his voice, "here we are. Home.
Anthony Doerr
#81. But curses are not real. Earth is all magma and continental crust and ocean. Gravity and time. Isn't it?
Anthony Doerr
#82. Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitary
Anthony Doerr
#83. And what we represent is an ordering to that chaos. Even down to the genes. We are ordering the evolution of
Anthony Doerr
#84. Is it dawn? She climbs the ladder and presses her ear to the trapdoor. No more sirens. Maybe the house burned
Anthony Doerr
#85. The very life of any creature is a quick-fading spark in fathomless darkness.
Anthony Doerr
#87. Speed, to hear their skates clapping along, then
Anthony Doerr
#88. silent desperation of everything they never said - gaps and absences in every conversation, the past circumscribing the present, the future hemming in the past.
Anthony Doerr
#89. Seventy-six years old," she whispers, "and I can still feel like this? Like a little girl with stars in my eyes?
Anthony Doerr
#90.
on her best days, she glimpses the limitless span of millennia behind her: millions of years, tens of millions.
Anthony Doerr
#91. Maybe ... a person can experience an illness as a kind of health. Maybe not every disease is a deficit, a taking away. Maybe what's happening to her is an opening, a window, a migration.
Anthony Doerr
#92. He thought he might say more, but something in her face had closed off, and the opportunity passed.
Anthony Doerr
#93. It's 1940 and no one laughs at the Hitler Youth now.
Anthony Doerr
#94. What is death, after all, but a cessation of involvement with the world, a departure from those you love, and those who love you?
Anthony Doerr
#98. 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
#99. Smoke: her great-uncle says it is a suspension of particles, billions of drifting carbon molecules. Bits of living rooms, cafes, trees. People.
Anthony Doerr
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