Anthony Doerr Quotes

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

That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much. Only the strongest people can turn away from feelings like that.

The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the globe . . . The sea is only a receptacle for all the prodigious, supernatural things that exist inside it. It is only movement and love; it is the living infinite.

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.

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

Do you think, Madame, that in heaven we will really get to see God face-to-face?” “We might.” “What if you’re blind?” “I’d expect that if God wants us to see something, we’ll see it.

So many windows are dark. It's as if the city has become a library of books in an unknown language, the houses great shelves of illegible volumes, the lamps all extinguished.

But there is a machine in the attic at work again. A spark in the night.

We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.

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

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

The things that look fixed in the world, child — mountains, wealth, empires — their permanence is only an illusion. We believe they will last, but that is only because of the brevity of our own lives. From the perspective of God, cities like this come and go like anthills.

Read a verse of Homer and you can walk the walls of Troy alongside Hector; fall into a paragraph by Fitzgerald and your Now entangles with Gatsby’s Now; open a 1953 book by Ray Bradbury and go hunting T. rexes. Ursula Le Guin said: “Story is our only boat for sailing on the river of time,” and she’s right, of course. The shelves of every library in the world brim with time machines. Step into one, and off you go.

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.

"Seventy-six years old," she whispers, "and I can still feel like this? Like a little girl with stars in my eyes?"

what's so beautiful about a fool is that a fool never knows when to give up