Doerr Quotes & Sayings

Rain falls so lightly that it seems indistinguishable from fog. — Anthony Doerr

Whoever wins, that's who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. — Anthony Doerr

We live in exceptional times. — Anthony Doerr

Sometimes the eye of a hurricane is the safest place to be. — Anthony Doerr

Maybe the Sea of Flames never existed at all, maybe curses aren't real, maybe her father is right: Earth is all magma and continental crust and ocean. Gravity and time. Stones are just stones and rain is just rain and misfortune is just bad — Anthony Doerr

Calm, weary voices directing fire. The same sort of voice God uses, perhaps, when He calls souls to Him. This way, please. — Anthony Doerr

Nine herons stand like flowers in the canal beside the coking plant. — Anthony Doerr

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

What you could be. — Anthony Doerr

I have everything I need. A square of sky, a piece of stone, a page, a pen, and memory raining down on me in sleeves. — Harriet 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

granite headland, drawing ever closer, looks like an unholy tooth, something black and dangerous, — 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

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

stirs the fire below them with a steel pole; a — Anthony Doerr

Beach. Everyone who can must work to strengthen — Anthony Doerr

We are dust only after all our water evaporates. — Anthony Doerr

What the war did to dreamers. — Anthony Doerr

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

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

The latrine is apocalyptic — Anthony Doerr

Her smile was genuine-looking and later he would mull her question over and over in his head until it mushroomed into something larger. — Anthony Doerr

says, Consider a single piece glowing in your — 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

A demonic horde. Upended sacks of beans. A hundred broken rosaries. There are a thousand metaphors and all of them are inadequate: forty bombs per aircraft, four hundred and eighty altogether, seventy-two thousand pounds of explosives. — Anthony Doerr

I am hearing you. On radio. Is why I come. — Anthony Doerr

And one particular characteristic that Doerr liked: "They were nerdy white males, dropouts with no social life."6 Again, Larry and Sergey went off to Burger King to celebrate. — Janet Lowe

I do fish. I think there is a connection between thinking and fishing mostly because you spend a lot of time up to your waist in water without a whole lot to keep your mind busy. — Anthony Doerr

They've found a way to privately, or within a small family group, share expressions, or other images, drawings, and then gain access to some of the world's great expressions and images and make them real, make them tangible. — John Doerr

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

family? Surely more than genes, eye color, flesh. Family was story: truth and struggle and retribution. Family was time. At the other end of the continent Felix was lying in a hospital bed, asleep, surrounded by kin - Soma and the boys, the ghosts of the Chileans he had known, the disappeared, the still-here. Winkler had a single memory of an infant girl at a window. Faces in a dream, phantoms in the periphery. If he had learned anything it was that family was not so much what you were given as what you were able — Anthony Doerr

That's how he 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. — Anthony Doerr

He made her the glowing hot center of his life; he made her feel as if every step she took was important. — Anthony Doerr

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

It is not so much the science of snow for me, anymore. I'd rather just look at it. The light, the way it absorbs sound. The way we feel as if the more that falls, the more we are forgiven. — Anthony Doerr

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience
buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello
become new all over again. — Anthony Doerr

Radio: it ties a million ears to a single mouth. — Anthony Doerr

Posters go up in the market, on tree trunks in the Place Chateaubriand. Voluntary surrender of firearms. Anyone who does not cooperate will be shot. — Anthony Doerr

What does he remember? He saw the engineer Bernd close the cellar door and sit on the stairs. — Anthony Doerr

Frau Elena paces the parlor, her slippers whispering left, whispering right. Coal cars grind past in the wet dark. Machinery hums in the distance: pistons throbbing, belts turning. Smoothly. Madly. — Anthony Doerr

How can one country make another change its clocks? What if everybody refuses?" "Then a lot of people will be early. Or late. — 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

Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor
it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people. — Anthony Doerr

Green-tech could be the largest economic opportunity of the 21st Century. — John 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

Isn't doing nothing a kind of troublemaking? — Anthony Doerr

Together, the unlikeliest of penitents, silently, grafting words to air, they sent their prayers into the room. — Anthony Doerr

The mind craves ease; it encourages the senses to recognize symbols, to gloss. It makes maps of our kitchen drawers and neighborhood streets; it fashions a sort of algebra out of life. And this is useful, even essential - X is the route to work, Y is the heft and feel of a nickel between your fingers. Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We'd pass out every time we saw - actually saw- a flower. — Anthony Doerr

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

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 — Anthony Doerr

Then help us."
"I don't want to make trouble, Madame."
"Isn't doing nothing a kind of troublemaking?"
"Doing nothing is doing nothing."
"Doing nothing is as good as collaborating."
...
"It's not a person you wish to fight, Madame, it's a system. How do you fight a system?"
"You try. — Anthony Doerr

Bastian speaks to a horror of any sort of corruption, and yet, Werner wonders in the dead of night, isn't life a kind of corruption? — Anthony Doerr

To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour. — Anthony Doerr

Don't you ever get tired of believing, Madame? Don't you ever want proof? — Anthony Doerr

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

land mines explode in front — Anthony Doerr

Memories are like corks left out of bottles. They swell. They no longer fit. — Harriet Doerr

He laughs a pure, contagious laugh, one she will try to remember all her life, — Anthony Doerr

Even the heart, which in higher animals, when agitated, pulsates with increased energy, in the snail under similar excitement, throbs with a slower motion. — Anthony Doerr

I always told my dad I'd play professional football. — Anthony Doerr

The fires pool and strut; they flow up the sides of the ramparts like tides; they splash into alleys, over rooftops, through a carpark. Smoke chases dust; ash chases smoke. A newsstand floats, burning. — Anthony Doerr

We act in the interest of peace. — Anthony Doerr

If the reason you're taking on a mission is for the money you'll make, I believe you'll fail. — John Doerr

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? — Anthony Doerr

A line comes back to Marie-Laure from Jules Verne: Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth. Etienne — Anthony Doerr

It wasn't until I was 26 or 25 when I started sending work out to magazines. — Anthony Doerr

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

Our shadows are our histories. We drag them everywhere. — Anthony Doerr

What I want to write about today is the sea. It contains so many colors. Silver at dawn, green at noon, dark blue in the evening. Sometimes it looks almost red. Or it will turn the color of old coins. Right now the shadows of clouds are dragging across it, and patches of sunlight are touching down everywhere. White strings of gulls drag over it like beads. It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. — Anthony Doerr

Here comes the light, nameless and intangible, streaming 93 million unobstructed miles through the implacable black vacuum to break itself against a wall, a cornice, a column. It drenches, it crenellates, it textures, It throws the city into relief. The coins fall through the slot; the illumination box clicks on. — Anthony Doerr

Whoever says adults are better at paying attention than children is wrong: we're too busying filtering out the world, focusing on some task or another, paying no attention. Our kids are the ones discovering new contents all day long. — Anthony Doerr

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

Her fingers travel back to the cathedral spire. South to the Gate of Dinan. All evening she has been marching her fingers around the model, waiting for her great-uncle Etienne, who owns this house, who went out the previous night while she slept, and who has not returned. And now it is night again, another revolution of the clock, and the whole block is quiet, and she cannot sleep. — Anthony Doerr

ANTHONY DOERR is the author of the story collections Memory Wall and The Shell Collector, the novel About Grace, and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome. He has won numerous prizes both in the United States and overseas, including four O. Henry Prizes, three Pushcart Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, the National Magazine Award for fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Story Prize. Raised in Cleveland, Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons. — Anthony Doerr

If you can't invent the future, the next best thing is to fund it. — John Doerr

Water was a wild, capricious substance: nothing solid, nothing permanent, nothing as it appeared. — Anthony Doerr

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. — Anthony Doerr

She said being able to give life was not something anyone should take for granted. — Anthony Doerr

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

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. — Anthony Doerr

We used to pick berries by the Ruhr. My sister and me. — Anthony Doerr

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

What the war did to the dreamers. — Anthony Doerr

Bernd molders in the corner. Jutta moves through the world somewhere, watching shadows disentangle themselves from night, watching minders limp past in the dawnn. It was enough when Werner was a boy, wasn't it? A world of wildflowers blooming up through the shapes of rusty cast-off parts. A world of berries and carrot peels ad Frau Elena's fairy tales. Of the sharp smell of tar, and trains passing, and a voice on the radio offering a loom on which to spin his dreams. — 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

This is not real suffering, she tells herself. this is only a matter of reprogramming her picture of the future. Of understanding that the line of descendancy is not continuous but arbitrary. — Anthony Doerr

What mazes there are in this world. — Anthony Doerr

The future waited for him to keep his appointment. — Anthony Doerr

They cross the Channel at midnight. There are twelve and they are named for songs: Stardust and Stormy Weather and In the Mood and Pistol-Packin' Mama. The sea glides along far below, spattered with the countless chevrons of whitecaps. Soon enough, the navigators can discern the low moonlit lumps of islands ranged along the horizon. — 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

And doesn't a writer do the same thing? Isn't she knitting together scraps of dreams? She hunts down the most vivid details and links them in sequences that will let a reader see, smell, and hear a world that seems complete in itself; she builds a stage set and painstakingly hides all the struts and wires and nail holes, then stands back and hopes whoever might come to see it will believe. — Anthony Doerr

All your life you wait, and then it finally comes, and are you ready? — Anthony Doerr

Seventy-six years old," she whispers, "and I can still feel like this? Like a little girl with stars in my eyes? — Anthony Doerr

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 — Anthony Doerr

An avalanche descends onto the city. A hurricane. Teacups drift off shelves. Paintings slip off nails. In another quarter second, the sirens are inaudible. Everything is inaudible. The roar becomes loud enough to separate membranes in the middle ear. — Anthony Doerr

What treasures they left behind! A gorgeous set of yellow topaz crystals on a gray matrix. A great pink hunk of beryl like a crystallized brain. A violet column of tourmaline from Madagascar that looks so rich he cannot resist the urge to stroke it. Bournonite; apatite on muscovite; natural zircon in a spray of colors; dozens more minerals he cannot name. — Anthony Doerr

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

Sometimes, in the darkness, Werner thinks the cellar may have its own faint light, perhaps emanating from the rubble, the space going a bit redder as the August day above them progresses toward dusk. After a while, he is learning, even total darkness is not quite darkness; more than once he thinks he can see his spread fingers when he passes them in front of his eyes. — Anthony Doerr

It's the absence of all the bodies, she thinks, that allows us to forget. It's that the sod seals them over. — Anthony Doerr

town, it says. Depart immediately — Anthony Doerr