Anthony Doerr Quotes

Is it right,” Jutta says, “to do something only because everyone else is doing it?

Doing nothing is as good as collaborating.

But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don't you do the same?

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?

(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.

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.

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

Maybe he was dead and this island was purgatory from which he could only watch the souls of the more deserving go shuttling past to their various Edens. What is death, after all, but a cessation of involvement with the world, a departure from those you love, and those who love you?

The way her fingers flutter through the space around her. Each a thing he hopes never to forget.

What mazes there are in this world. The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father recreated in his models... None more complicated than the human brain, Etienne would say, what may be the most complex object in existence; one wet kilogram within which spin universes.

Every outcome has its cause, and every predicament has its solution.

Why else do any of this if not to become who we want to 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.

What the war did to dreamers.

Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.