Anthony Doerr Quotes

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.

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. It brims with color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

It’s not a person you wish to fight, Madame, it’s a system. How do you fight a system?” “You try.

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.

Live faithfully, fight bravely, and die laughing.

Hope is the pillar that holds up the world.

Don’t you want to be alive before you die?

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

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

I am only alive because I have not yet died.

By age seventeen he [Seymoure Sthulman]'d convinced himself that every human being he saw was a parasite, captive to the dictates of consumption. But as he reconstructs Zeno's translation, he realizes that the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we all are beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.

I am hearing you. On radio. Is why I come.

How do men convince themselves that others must die so they might live?

Sometimes the eye of a hurricane is the safest place to be.

We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.