There's always been a sliver of panic in him, deeply buried, when it comes to his daughter. A fear that he is no good as a father, that he is doing everything wrong. That he never quite understood the...
There is luck, maybe, bad or good. A slight inclination of each day toward success or failure.
The murex Dr. Geffard keeps on his desk can entertain her for a half hour, the hollow spines, the ridged whorls, the deep entrance; it’s a forest of spikes and caves and textures; it’s a kingdom. Her
The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of lig...
The big trunk of the umbrella pine looms outside the window, living its two lives—the upper world of needles and stems, the lower world of roots and soil.
The afternoon is bright enough, but Berlin seems not to want to accept the sunlight, as though its buildings have become gloomier and dirtier and more splotchy int he months since he last visited. Tho...
She can hear the bombers when they are three miles away. A mounting static. The hum inside a seashell.
Parisian cousins nobody has heard from in decades now write letters begging for capons, hams, hens. The dentist is selling wine through the mail.
It’s surely nonsense, yet something hangs inside it, some truth he does not want to allow himself
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's the absence of all the bodies, she thinks, that allows us to forget. It's that the sod seals them over.
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.
He sees what other people don’t. What the war did to dreamers.
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.
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,...
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 outcome has its cause, and every predicament has its solution. Every lock its key.
Every morning he ties his shoes, packs newspaper inside his coat as insulation against the cold, and begins interrogating the world.
Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world. We rise again in the gross. In the flowers. In songs.