It’s surely nonsense, yet something hangs inside it, some truth he does not want to allow himself
It's the absence of all the bodies, she thinks, that allows us to forget. It's that the sod seals them over.
It was enough when Werner was a boy, wasn't it? A world of wildflowers blooming up through the shapes of rusty cast-off parts. A world of berries and carrot peels and Frau Elena's fairy tales. Of the...
If there are fireflies this summer, they do not come down the rue Vauborel. Now it seems there are only shadows and silence. Silence is the fruit of the occupation; it hangs in branches, seeps from gu...
If only life were like a Jules Verne novel, thinks Marie-Laure, and you could page ahead when you most needed to, and learn what would happen.
How do you ever know for certain that you are doing the right thing? There is pride, too, though—pride that he has done it alone. That his daughter is so curious, so resilient. There is the humility o...
Herr Siedler smiles as if to say: You and I, son, we know history takes a longer course, don't we?
He sees what other people don’t. What the war did to dreamers.
He made her the glowing hot center of his life; he made her feel as if every step she took was important.
He lingers over images of Marie-Laure—her hands, her hair—even as he worries that to concentrate on them too long is to risk wearing them out.
Frau Rosenbaum describes the November light in Venice, how it simultaneously hardens and softens everything. In the evenings that light is like liquid, she sighs. You want to drink it.
Firelit rooms lined with books - these are the places in which important things happen.
Everything has led to this: the death of his father; all those restless hours with Jutta listening to the crystal radio in the attic; Hans and Herribert wearing their red armbands under their shirts s...
Every morning he ties his shoes, packs newspaper inside his coat as insulation against the cold, and begins interrogating the world.
Don't you miss the world? He is quiet; so is she. Both ride spirals of memory.I have the whole world right here, he says, and taps the cover of Darwin, And in my radios. Right at my fingertips.Her unc...
Disgrace is not to fall but to lie.
Did you know, says Marie-Laure, that the chance of being hit by lightning is one in one million? Dr. Geffard taught me that. In one year or in one lifetime? I’m not sure. You should have asked.
Dentro de su pecho late algo enorme, algo lleno deseo, algo que ya no siente temor.
Crack. Pause. Crack. Pause. Then the long scream as the
Cold demanded a sharper, simpler view of things: in those temperatures death hovered at the margins, offering clarity, providing precision. But it blurred things, too: the border between dreams and wa...