Anthony Doerr Quotes & Sayings

A one-armed bunk master sets forth rules in a belligerent torrent. "This is your parade uniform, this is your field uniform, this is your gym uniform. Suspenders crossed in the back, parallel in the front. Sleeves rolled to the elbow. Each boy is to carry a knife in a scabbard on the right side of the belt. Raise your right arm when you wish to be called upon. Always align in rows of ten. No books, no cigarettes, no food, no personal possessions, nothing in your locker but uniforms, boots, knife, polish. No talking after lights-out. Letters home will be posted on Wednesdays. You will strip away your weakness, your cowardice, your hesitation. You will become like a waterfall, a volley of bullets - you will all surge in the same direction at the same pace toward the same cause. You will forgo comforts; you will live by duty alone. You will eat country and breathe nation." Do — Anthony Doerr

There is pride, too, though - pride that he has done it alone. That his daughter is so curious, so resilient. There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing. 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 city, and the brightness of that feeling would not wane. The drain moans; the cluttered house crowds in close. — Anthony Doerr

Open your eyes before they close forever — Anthony Doerr

The air between them seemed to accumulate energy. — Anthony Doerr

Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It's wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original. — Anthony Doerr

The dreams had ceased coming, as they often did, retreating somewhere else for years, until another event of sufficient significance neared, and the patterns of circumstance dragged them to the surface again. — Anthony Doerr

That his daughter is so curious, so resilient. There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing. That's how it feels right now, he thinks, — Anthony Doerr

Wednesdays. You will strip away — Anthony Doerr

from Volkheimer to Werner. — Anthony Doerr

He could see tiny particles of dust drifting in the air between her ankles, each fleck tumbling individually in and out of the sunlight, and there was something intensely familiar in their arrangement. — Anthony Doerr

At Madame's suggestion, they lie down in the weeds, and Marie-Laure listens to honeybees mine the flowers and tries to imagine their journeys as Etienne described them: each worker following a rivulet of odor, looking for ultraviolet patterns in the flowers, filling baskets on her hind legs with pollen grains, then navigating, drunk and heavy, all the way home. How — Anthony Doerr

Where," he asks, "is that book? The one with the birds? In the gold slipcover? — Anthony Doerr

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 — Anthony Doerr

How about peaches, dear? murmurs Madame Manec, and Marie-Laure can hear a can opening, juice slopping into a bowl. Seconds later, she's eating wedges of wet sunlight. — Anthony Doerr

Impossibly, the static coalesces into music. Volkheimer's eyes open as wide as they can. Straining the blackness for every stray photon. A single piano runs up scales. Then back down. He listens to the notes and the silences between them, and then finds himself leading horses through a forest at dawn, trudging through snow behind his great-grandfather, who walks with a saw draped over his huge shoulders, the snow squeaking beneath boots and hooves, all the trees above them whispering and creaking. They reach the edge of a frozen pond, where a pine grows as tall as a cathedral. His great-grandfather goes to his knees like a penitent, fits the saw into a groove in the bark, and begins to cut. — Anthony Doerr

Potatoes at six o'clock, Marie. Mushrooms at three. Now? — Anthony Doerr

A fourth door, and a fifth, on and on until you reach a thirteenth, a little locked door no bigger than a shoe." The children lean forward. "And then?" "Behind the thirteenth door" - the guide flourishes one of his impossibly wrinkled hands - "is the Sea of Flames." Puzzlement. Fidgeting. "Come now. You've never heard of the Sea of Flames? — Anthony Doerr

Stones are just stones and rain is just rain and misfortune is just bad luck. — Anthony Doerr

To a certain extent, time was malleable, what he did did matter. Grace was proof of that. Naaliyah was alive. — Anthony Doerr

We all grew up before we were grown up. — Anthony Doerr

Live faithfully, fight bravely, and die laughing. — Anthony Doerr

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

The latrine is apocalyptic — Anthony Doerr

Everyone should behave as if he carries the real thing. — Anthony Doerr

It is the rarest thing ... that gets preserved, that does not get erased, broken down, transformed. — Anthony Doerr

Jutta, he thinks, I finally listened. — Anthony Doerr

Marie-Laure hears Madame Manec: You must never stop believing. — Anthony Doerr

Walk the paths of logic. Every outcome has its cause, and every predicament has its solution. Every lock its key. — Anthony Doerr

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. — Anthony Doerr

The bony figure of Death rides the streets below, stopping his mount now and then to peer into windows. Horns of fire on his head and smoke leaking from his nostrils and, in his skeletal hand, a list of newly charged with addresses. — Anthony Doerr

We return to the places we're from; we trample faded corners and pencil in new lines. — Anthony Doerr

A single bed with blood in it. Blood on the pillow and on the sheets and even on the enameled metal of the bed frame. Pink rags in a basin. Half-unrolled bandage on the floor. The nurse bustles over and grimaces at Werner. Outside of the kitchens, she is the only woman at the school. — Anthony Doerr

You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't. — Anthony Doerr

Clair de Lune," a song that makes her think of leaves fluttering, and of the hard ribbons of sand beneath her feet at low tide. The music slinks and rises and settles back to earth, — Anthony Doerr

My prose can be dense. I love to pile on detail. I love to describe. I'm much more reluctant to give the reader entrance into a character's feeling than describe what's around him or her and have the reader intuit the internal life of a character. I know that's demanding, so this was a gesture of friendliness, maybe. It's like I'm saying to the reader, I know this is going to be more lyrical than maybe 70 percent of American readers want to see, but here's a bunch of white space for you to recover from that lyricism. — Anthony Doerr

Between them was fifteen or so feet of frozen space, bounded by his window and hers, but it was as if the windows had liquefied, or else the air had, and his vision skewed and rippled and it was all he could do to put the Newport into gear and ease forward to let the next car in. — Anthony Doerr

And 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 terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? — Anthony Doerr

See obstacles as opportunities. See obstacles as inspiration. — Anthony Doerr

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

Well, Fredde has all the best there at that school, all the — Anthony Doerr

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. — Anthony Doerr

If only she had brought her novel down with her. — Anthony Doerr

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

His voice is low and soft, a piece of silk you might keep in a drawer and pull out only on rare occasions, just to feel it between your fingers. — Anthony Doerr

You have to trust someone sometime. — Anthony Doerr

Werner wonders in the dead of night, isn't life a kind of corruption? A child is born, and the world sets in upon it. Taking things from it, stuffing things into it. Each bite of food, each particle of light entering the eye - the body can never be pure. — Anthony Doerr

A ghastly creeping terror rises from a place beyond thoughts. Some innermost trapdoor she must leap upon immediately and lean against with all her weight and padlock shut. — Anthony Doerr

The whole thing feels like a pool of water that I'm trying to hold in my hands. — Anthony Doerr

Twenty thousand days and nights in one place, each layered and trapped and folded on top of the last, the creases in her hands, the aches between her vertebrae. Embryo, seed coat, endosperm: What is a seed if not the purest kind of memory, a link to every generation that has gone before it? — Anthony Doerr

I guess whatever maturity is there may be there because I've been keeping a journal forever. In high school my friends would make fun of me - you're doing your man diary again. So I was always trying to translate experience into words. — Anthony Doerr

At the crest of a low hill, her father looks over his shoulder: vehicles are backed up as far as he can see, carryalls and vans, a sleek new cloth-top wraparound V-12 — Anthony Doerr

He sees what other people don't. What the war did to dreamers. — Anthony Doerr

Studying ice crystals as a graduate student, he eventually found the basic design (equilateral, equiangled hexagon) so icily repeated, so unerringly conforming, that he couldn't help but shudder: Beneath the splendor
the filigreed blossoms, the microscopic stars
was a ghastly inevitability; crystals could not escape their embedded blueprints any more than humans could. Everything hewed to a rigidity of pattern, the certainty of death. — Anthony Doerr

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

The years passed as clouds do, ephemeral and vaporous, condensing, sliding along awhile, then dispersing like ghosts. — Anthony Doerr

First we die, the woman says. "Then our bodies are buried. So we die two deaths." "Then in another world, folded inside the living world, we wait. We wait until everyone who knew us when we were children has died. And then the last of them dies, we finally die our third death. — Anthony Doerr

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

Foucault's pendulum would — Anthony Doerr

Why doesn't the wind move the light? — Anthony Doerr

Just when we think we have a system, ... the system collapses. Just when we know our way around, we get lost. Just when we think we know what's coming next, everything changes. — Anthony Doerr

To men like that, time was a surfeit, a barrel they watched slowly drain. When really, he thinks, it's a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop. — Anthony Doerr

In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history. — Anthony Doerr

his heart laced with regret. — Anthony Doerr

A scientist's work is determined by two things: his interests and those of his time. Everything has led to this. — Anthony Doerr

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

There are, he assures her, no such things as curses. There is luck, maybe, bad or good. A slight inclination of each day towards success or failure. But no curses. — Anthony Doerr

German sailors sing a drunken song in the street, and a house spider over the stove spins a new web every night, and to Marie-Laure this is a double cruelty: that everything else keeps living, that the spinning earth does not pause for even an instant in its trip around the sun. — Anthony Doerr

Chrysoberyl. Among them twinkle hundreds upon — Anthony Doerr

Speed, to hear their skates clapping along, then — Anthony Doerr

land mines explode in front — Anthony Doerr

See obstacles as opportunities, Reinhold. See obstacles as inspirations. — Anthony Doerr

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

Travel definitely affects me as a writer. — Anthony Doerr

I used to think ... that I had to be careful with how much I lived. As if life was a pocketful of coins. You only got so much and you didn't want to spend it all in one place ... But now I know that life is the one thing in the world that never runs out. I might run out of mine, and you might run out of yours, but the world will never run out of life. And we're all very lucky to be part of something like that. — Anthony Doerr

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

But the cracks were splitting, finding power, thickening into chasms. — Anthony Doerr

Out here the prisoners see the shells smash into the city before they hear them. During the last war, Etienne knew artillerymen who could peer through field glasses and discern their shells' damage by the colors thrown skyward. Gray was stone. Brown was soil. Pink was flesh. — Anthony Doerr

With the countless chevrons of whitecaps. Soon enough, the navigators can discern the low moonlit lumps of islands ranged along the horizon. France. — Anthony Doerr

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 and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother's birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us. — Anthony Doerr

She'd been naked in her pool, floating on her back, when she realized that her life - two kids, a three-story Tudor, an Audi wagon - was not what she wanted. — Anthony Doerr

She opens the door to her grandfather's bedroom and stops. Below her, the man pauses again. Has he heard her? Is he climbing more quietly? Out in the world waits a multitude of sanctuaries - gardens full of bright green wind; kingdoms of hedges; deep pools of forest shade through which butterflies float thinking only of nectar. She can get to none of them. — Anthony Doerr

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

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

His mother the Ice Queen. The only thing he still had of hers was a book: Snow Crystals, by W. A. Bentley. Inside were thousands of carefully prepared micrographs of snowflakes, each image reproduced in a two-inch square, the crystals white against a field of black, arrayed in a grid, four-by-three, twelve per page. — Anthony Doerr

Up and down the lanes, the last unevacuated townspeople wake, groan, sigh. Spinsters, prostitutes, men over sixty. Procrastinators, collaborators, disbelievers, drunks. Nuns of every order. The poor. The stubborn. The blind. — Anthony Doerr

Every process must by law decay. — Anthony Doerr

We are a volley of bullets, we are cannonballs. We are the tip of the sword. — Anthony Doerr

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

Mostly he misses Jutta: her loyalty, her obstinacy, the way she always seems to recognize what is right. Though in Werner's weaker moments, he resents those same qualities in his sister. Perhaps she's the impurity in him, the static in his signal that the bullies can sense. — Anthony Doerr

So many windows are dark. It's as if the city has become a library of books in an unknown language, the houses great shelves of illegible volumes, the lamps all extinguished.
But there is a machine in the attic at work again. A spark in the night. — Anthony Doerr

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

I wasn't trying to reach England. or Paris. I thought that if I made the broadcast powerful enough, my brother would hear me. That I could bring him some peace, protect him as he had always protected me."

You'd play your brother's own voice to him? After he died?"

"And Debussy."

Did he ever talk back?"

The attic ticks. What ghosts sidle along the walls right now, trying to overhear? She can almost taste her great-uncle's fright in the air.

"No," he says. "He never did. — Anthony Doerr

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

There must be some definite cause why, whenever snow begins to fall, its initial formation invariably displays the shape of a six-cornered starlet. For if it happens by chance, why do they not fall just as well with five corners or with seven? . . . Who carved the nucleus, before it fell, into six horns of ice? - From "On the Six-Cornered Snowflake," by Johannes Kepler, 1610 — Anthony Doerr

Radio - and perhaps airplanes, and then of course, the atom bomb - was the preeminent technology of the first half of the 20th century. It was how the Third Reich controlled its citizens, spread lies, and disseminated fear. — Anthony Doerr

An onion-breathed technician in a lab coat measures the distance between Werner's temples, the circumference of his head, and the thickness and shape of his lips. Calipers are used to evaluate his feet, the length of his fingers, and the distance between his eyes and his navel. They measure his penis. The angle of his nose is quantified with a wooden protractor. — Anthony Doerr

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

Every outcome has its cause, and every predicament has its solution. — Anthony Doerr

The stars were so many and so white they looked like chips of ice, hammered through the fabric of the sky. — Anthony Doerr

They sleep despite noise, despite cold, despite hunger, as though desperate to stay removed from the waking world for as long as possible. — Anthony Doerr