Few Anthony Doerr Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Anthony Doerr

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

But over these past few weeks, her existence has become tolerable. At least, out on the beaches, her privation and fear are rinsed away by wind and color and light. Most — 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

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

His thoughts skirted Sandy and especially Grace as if they were fatal chasms into which he might tumble. — Anthony Doerr

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

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

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

We act in the interest of peace. — 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

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