Late-night shortwave: province of ramblers and dreamers, madmen and ranters.
It’s like cold silk. Cold, sumptuous silk onto which the sea has laid offerings: pebbles, shells, barnacles. Tiny slips of wrack. Her fingers dig and reach; the drops of rain touch the back of her nec...
It strikes Werner just then as wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colourful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing indifferen...
It seems to Werner that in the space between whatever has happened already and whatever is to come hovers an invisible borderland, the known on one side and the unknown on the other.
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...
Inside each airplane, a bombardier peers through an aiming window and counts to twenty.
In stormy light, its granite glows blue. At the highest tides, the sea creeps into basements at the very center of town. At the lowest tides, the barnacled ribs of a thousand shipwrecks stick out abov...
If your same blood doesn't run in the arms and legs of the person you're next to, you can't trust anything.
I heard that the diamond is like a piece of light from the original world. Before it fell. A piece of light rained to earth from God.
He waits until dark. Marie-Laure sits in the mouth of the wardrobe, the false back open, and listens to her uncle switch on the microphone and the transmitter in the attic. His mild voice speaks numbe...
He thinks of the old broken miners he'd see in Zollverein, sitting in chairs or on crates, not moving for hours, waiting to die. To men like that time was a surfeit, a barrel they watched slowly drain...
He takes her hand to help her over the piles. No shells fall and no rifles crack and the light is soft and shot through with ash. Jutta, he thinks, I finally listened.
He says, You are very brave.She lowers the bucket. What is your name?He tells her. She says, When I lost my sight Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it...
He is about to hand the earphone to Jutta when—clear and unblemished, about halfway down the coil—he hears the quick, drastic strikes of a bow dashing across the strings of a violin. He tries to hold...
He found himself thinking of water, how it is never still, how even in our bodies water never relents: ceaselessly vibrating, each electron in each molecule in each cell orbiting, spinning, nine indep...
He blinks; he has to swallow back tears.
Gulls pass, braying like donkeys, and in the distance the guns thud again, and the rattling of the truck fades, and Marie-Laure tries to concentrate on rereading a chapter earlier in the novel: make t...
Good with tools, Herr Siedler is saying. Smart beyond your years. There are places for a boy like you. General Heissmeyer’s schools. Best of the best. Teach the mechanical sciences too. Code breaking,...
From the molten basements of the world, two hundred miles down, it comes. One crystal in a seam of others. Pure carbon, each atom linked to four equidistant neighbors, perfectly knit, tetrahedral, uns...
Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world. We