Anthony Doerr Quotes

My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

A good journal entry- like a good song, or sketch, or photograph- ought to break up the habitual and life away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought to be a love letter to the world.

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?

You must never stop believing. That’s the most important thing.

-quick-witted, an open book in her lap; inside her chest pulses something huge, something full of longing, something unafraid.

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

This, she realizes, is the basis of all fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark.

Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We’d pass out every time we saw - actually saw - a flower. Imagine if we only got to see a cumulonimbus cloud or Cassiopeia or a snowfall once a century: there’d be pandemonium in the streets. People would lie by the thousands in the fields on their backs.

What the war did to dreamers.

War is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity: chocolate or bullets or parachute silk.

It was not,' said Jutta, reaching the limits of her French, 'very easy to be good then.

It was hard to live through the early 1940s in France and not have the war be the center from which the rest of your life spiraled.

He sweeps her hair back from her ears; he swings her above his head. he says she is his émerveillement. He says he will never leave her, not in a million years.

On the rue de la Crosse, the Hotel of Bees becomes almost weightless for a moment, lifted in a spiral of flame, before it begins to rain the pieces back to the earth

Jutta whispers, “A girl got kicked out of the swimming hole today. Inge Hachmann. They said they wouldn’t let us swim with a half-breed. Unsanitary. A half-breed, Werner. Aren’t we half-breeds too? Aren’t we half our mother, half our father?

Did time move forward, through people, or did people move through it, like clouds across the sky?