Light of the moon? She almost smiles. We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in a...
Is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like...
Her shoes. The world seems to sway gently back and forth, as though the town is drifting lightly away. As though back onshore, all of France is left to bite its fingernails and flee and stumble and we...
When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same? He
When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is no bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don't you do the same?
Werner feels he is gazing down into the circuitry of an enormous radio, each soldier down there an electron flowing single file down his own electrical path, with no more say in the matter than an ele...
Werner and his younger sister, Jutta, are raised at Children's House, a clinker-brick two-story orphanage on Viktoriastrasse whose rooms are populated with the coughs of sick children and the crying o...
To shut your eyes is to guess nothing about blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon i...
They clomp together through the narrow streets, Marie-Laure’s hand on the back of Madame’s apron, following the odors of her stews and cakes; in such moments Madame seems like a great moving wall of r...
Then it resumes, the twin wands of its horns extending, dragging its whorled shell atop the sled of its body. What do you seek, little snail? Do you live only in this one moment, or do you worry like...
The true Aryan is as blond as Hitler, as slim as Göring, and as tall as Goebbels—
The shell may be broken, and even portions of it removed, and yet after a certain lapse of time the injured parts will be repaired by a deposition of shelly matter at the fractured parts. There’s hope...
The girl climbs into the swing and pendulums back and forth, pumping her legs, and watching her opens some valve in Werner’s soul. This is life, he thinks, this is why we live, to play like this on a...
That’s how it feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing her hair: as though his love for his daughter will outstrip the limits of his body. The walls could fall away, even the whole cit...
Siga a lógica. Todo efeito tem sua causa, e todo problema tem sua solução. Toda fechadura tem sua chave. Você pode voltar para Paris ou permancer aqui ou seguir em frente.
She reaches for his hand, sets something in his palm, and squeezes his hand into a fist. Goodbye, Werner. Goodbye, Marie-Laure.
Radio: it ties a million ears to a single mouth. Out of loudspeakers all around Zollverein, the staccato voice of the Reich grows like some imperturbable tree; its subjects lean toward its branches as...
Prosperity depends on ferocity. The only things that keep your precious grandmothers in their tea and cookies are the fists at the end of your arms.
Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitrary.
Logic, reason, pure science: these, Aronnax insists, are the proper ways to pursue a mystery. Not fables and fairy tales.