Anthony Doerr Quotes

To be in love was to be dazed twenty times a morning: by the latticework of frost on his windshield; by a feather loosed from his pillow; by a soft, pink rim of light over the hills.

Every rumor carries a seed of truth,

strange how suffering can look beautiful if you get far enough away

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.

"Some stories," she says, "can be both false and true at the same time."

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.

It was hard to live through the early 1940s in France and not have the war be the center from which the rest of your life spiraled. Marie-Laure still cannot wear shoes that are too large, or smell a boiled turnip, without experiencing revulsion. Neither can she listen to lists of names. Soccer team rosters, citations at the end of journals, introductions at faculty meetings – always they seem to her some vestige of the prison lists that never contained her father’s name.

Is she happy? For portions of every day, she is happy.

To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.

I am only alive because I have not yet died.

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.

Open your eyes...and see what you can with them before they close forever.

A shell screams over the house. He thinks: I only want to sit here with her for a thousand hours.

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.