Anthony Doerr quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Anthony Doerr

Anthony Doerr Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Anthony Doerr on Wise Famous Quotes.

pilaster, probably meant to anchor a

How do you ever know for certain that you are doing the right thing?

He checked the barometer he'd nailed to the family room wall: the pressure was rising.

I am hearing you. On radio. Is why I come.

Papa, it's too expesive.'
' That's for me to worry about.

town, it says. Depart immediately

What light shines at night! He never knew. Light will blind him.

The year swung past the fulcrum of another equinox.

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

In the infinite permutation of an ice crystal, everything repeats itself, but, really, from another point of view, nothing repeats itself.

He is a man who understands the power of the German soil, who feels its dark prehistoric vigor thudding in his very cells.

I always told my dad I'd play professional football.

Who had he been? A failed father, a runaway husband. A son. A packet of unopened letters. He was dead; he was dead.

Hope is something that can be very dangerous but without it life would be horribly dry. Impossible, even.

Knock him on the head with the umbrella stand? Jab him with the paring knife? Scream. Die. Papa.

Late-night shortwave: province of ramblers and dreamers, madmen and ranters.

She was crying now, quietly, inhaling so vehemently it was as if she were trying to suck the tears back into her eyes.

The walls could fall away, even the whole city, and the brightness of that feeling would not wane. The

Over time his images of the baby, like photographs handled too often, had worn down and creased, lost their definition.

Chrysoberyl. Among them twinkle hundreds upon

He says, "I saved her only to hear her die.

Is it dawn? She climbs the ladder and presses her ear to the trapdoor. No more sirens. Maybe the house burned

Rain falls so lightly that it seems indistinguishable from fog.

Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.

He says there are sixty-five million specimens in this place, and if you have the right teacher, each can be as interesting as the last.

A scientist's work, cadet, is determined by two things. His interests and the interests of his time. Do

When God stops whispering, they become desperate for someone who can put things right.

He waits a long time. The captain reviews the fingernails

Travel definitely affects me as a writer.

Into the stillness come the voices of his masters, echoing from one side of his head while memory speaks from the other.

But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don't you do the same?

The Goddess of History looked down to earth. Only through the hottest fires can purification be achieved.

He blinks; he has to swallow back tears. The parlor

Radio: it ties a million ears to a single mouth.

To enter a world of shadows is to leave this world for another.

should be a wall, her hands find

who stood by as the consequences

There are comforts in knowing the boundaries of the place you live. Everyone here seems to behave like things are endless.

You have to trust someone sometime.

Then she thinks: There could be food in those packs.

Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitary

The dread that had been rising all morning rose higher in his throat as if by capillary action.

Fifteen and a half years as incontestable, a continent he'd never visit, a staircase he'd never climb.

ninety-two-carat raw diamond from South

Firelit rooms lined with books - these are the places in which important things happen.

What the war did to the dreamers.

He was failing at everything important. A room away his daughter was sitting with her face in her hands and he could not go to her.

Memories cartwheel out of her head & tumble across the floor.

weaker moments, he

The bookseller said it's in two parts, and this is the first. I thought that next year, if we keep saving, we can get the second -

Yet they spoke now across a glass-topped dining table as if words were just words, as if their histories were equivalent.

Even the banana plantations, the big, hardy trees on the flanks of Mount St. Andrew, seemed to lilt and acquiesce in the heat.

What the war did to dreamers.

I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff.

We live in exceptional times.

Marie-Laure is glad to hear a smile enter his voice. But beneath it she can sense his thoughts fluttering like trapped birds.

Memory is a house with ten thousand rooms; it is a village slated to be inundated." from "Village 113

So many human beings, none of them seeing clearly.

Assume the world offers safety and rationality when of course it does not.

Jutta, he thinks, I finally listened.

Herr Siedler smiles as if to say: You and I, son, we know history takes a longer course, don't we?

I'm thankful that everything sweet is sweet because it is finite.

land mines explode in front

Waiting is a kind of war. You simply tell yourself that you must not lose.

Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.

Nearly every species that has ever lived has gone extinct, Laurette. No reason to think we humans will be any different!

March, rain at the windows, and he had to be up at five the next morning. He listened to the click and patter of drops against the panes.

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

What you could be.

Who will lie on her back and let her last breath curl up to the ceiling as a curse upon the invaders.

Von Rumpel laughs. He appreciates that they are trying to play the game. But don't they understand that the winner has already been determined? He

the air would get so heavy with moisture he imagined he could feel each bloated molecule as it toppled into his lungs.

He could not look at his daughter without feeling his heart turn over.

It's 1940 and no one laughs at the Hitler Youth now.

To know her is to realize the thousand forms of inquiry.

Every cell in a dying body winks out at its own pace.

Still night. Still early.

A foot of steel looks as if it has been transformed into warm butter and gouged by the fingers of a child,

on her best days, she glimpses the limitless span of millennia behind her: millions of years, tens of millions.

bravest. Who will lie on her back and let her last breath curl up

That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much. Only the strongest people can turn away from feelings like that.

Silence is the fruit of the occupation; it hangs in branches, seeps from gutters.

The air between them seemed to accumulate energy.

Before you eat, drink as much water as you can, and you will feel full more quickly.

He wondered if such things were born into people. If perhaps we cannot alter who we are - if the place we come from dictates the place we will end up.

A real diamond is never perfect.

Memories cartwheel out of her head & tumble across the floor.

Frau Elena, does a bee know it's going to die if it stings somebody?

Jutta opens her eyes but doesn't look at him. 'Don't tell lies. Lie to yourself, Werner, but don't lie to me.

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.

Leafless trees stand atop slag heaps like skeleton hands shoved up from the underworld.

Breitenau." The first policeman

she'd left, feeling the emptiness of the big theater

These were the beginnings of a new existence; Winkler could feel it gestating.

yourself to sleep at night. Bleed your weasel.

When he turns to go, the perfumer's

How wonderful it is to by my age - our age - and learn you were wrong about such a fundamental thing.

But it was also something in Sandy herself, an unwillingness to allow anything more to upset the realm of her understanding.

How few days are left in the lives of anyone. How few hours.

Where do memories go once we've lost our ability to summon them? It