Anthony Doerr Quotes

Still night. Still early.

Every cell in a dying body winks out at its own pace.

Sometimes, in the darkness, Werner thinks the cellar may have its own faint light, perhaps emanating from the rubble, the space going a bit redder as the August day above them progresses toward dusk....

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

Something

Every day, on his right and left, another soul escapes toward the sky, and it sounds to him as if he can hear faraway music, as if a door has been shut on a grand old radio and he can listen only by p...

Snowy, milky, chalky. A color that is the absence of color. Every morning he ties his shoes, packs newspaper inside his coat as insulation against the cold, and begins interrogating the world.

Smoke: her great-uncle says it is a suspension of particles, billions of drifting carbon molecules. Bits of living rooms, cafes, trees. People.

What the war did to dreamers

When Werner wakes, it’s well past dawn. His head aches and his eyeballs feel heavy. Frederick is already dressed, wearing trousers, an ironed shirt, and a necktie, kneeling against the window with his...

She turns her face toward his, and though she cannot see him, he feels he cannot bear her gaze. Won’t you come with me?

She thinks: They just say words, and what are words but sounds these men shape out of breath, weightless vapors they send into the air of the kitchen to dissipate and die.

When he turns to go, the perfumer’s

When the wind is blowing, which it almost always is, with the walls groaning and the shutters banging, the rooms overloaded and the staircase wound tightly up through its center, the house seems the m...

She has no memories of her mother but imagines her as white, a soundless brilliance.

Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest.

I am only alive because I have not died.

Vitrine. Upstairs his wife runs a vacuum cleaner; he can

From Jules Verne: Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.

Is she happy? For portions of every day, she is happy. When she's standing beneath a tree, for instance, listening to the leaves vibrating in the wind, or when she opens a package from a collector and...