Anthony Doerr Quotes

But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.

To men like that, time was a surfeit, a barrel they watched slowly drain. When really, he thinks, it’s a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop.

She walks like a ballerina in dance slippers, her feet as articulate as hands, a little vessel of grace moving out into the fog.

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

Werner wonders in the dead of night, isn’t life a kind of corruption? A child is born, and the world sets in upon it.

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

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

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

we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human

Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one — that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes.

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.

Do you know what happens, Etienne,” says Madame Manec from the other side of the kitchen, “when you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water?” “You will tell us, I am sure.” “It jumps out. But do you know what happens when you put the frog in a pot of cool water and then slowly bring it to a boil? You know what happens then?” Marie-Laure waits. The potatoes steam. Madame Manec says, “The frog cooks.

Doing nothing is as good as collaborating.

I am only alive because I have not yet died.

Radio: it ties a million ears to a single mouth.