Marie Laure Quotes & Sayings

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 — Anthony Doerr

Marie-Laure says, I heard that the diamond is like a piece of light from the original world. Before it fell. A piece of light rained to earth from God. — Anthony Doerr

The clanging of the cart recedes. Marie-Laure — 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

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

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

Graceful. Lean. Coordinated as she whirls, though how she knows what dancing is, [her grandfather] could never guess.

The song plays on. He lets it go too long. The antenna is still up, probably dimly visible against the sky, the whole attic might as well shine like a beacon. But in the candlelight, in the sweet rush of a concerto, Marie-Laure bites her lower lip, and her face gives off a secondary glow, reminding him of the marshes beyond the town walls, in those winter dusks when the sun has set but isn't fully swallowed, and big patches of red pools of light burn - places he used to go with his brother, in what seems like lifetimes ago. — Anthony Doerr

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

But what Marie-Laure remembered, standing at the rail as it whistled past, was her father saying that Foucault's pendulum would never stop. It would keep swinging, she understood, after she and her father left the Pantheon, after she had fallen asleep that night. After she had forgotten about it, and lived her entire life, and died. — Anthony Doerr

But we are the good guys. Aren't we, Uncle?"
"I hope so. I hope we are. — Anthony Doerr

The despair doesn't last. Marie-Laure is too young and her father is too patient. — Anthony Doerr

The city, thinks Marie-Laure, is slowly being remade into the model upstairs. Streets sucked empty one by one. — Anthony Doerr

We're in Borneo, can't you tell? We're skimming the treetops now, big leaves are glimmering below us, and there are coffee bushes over there, smell them? and Marie-Laure will indeed smell something, whether because her uncle is passing coffee grounds beneath her nose, or because they really are flying over the coffee trees of Borneo, she does not want to decide. — Anthony Doerr

And yet she can tell he is visited by fears so immense, so multiple, that she can almost feel the terror pulsing inside him. As though some beast breathes all the time at the windowpanes of his mind. — Anthony Doerr

A little brown house sparrow swoops out of the rafters and lands on the tiles in front of her. Marie-Laure holds out an open palm. The sparrow tilts his head, considering. Then it flaps away. One month later she is blind. — Anthony Doerr

Do you know what happens, Etienne," says Madame Manec from the other side of the kitchen, "when you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water?" "You will tell us, I am sure." "It jumps out. But do you know what happens when you put the frog in a pot of cool water and then slowly bring it to a boil? You know what happens then?" Marie-Laure waits. The potatoes steam. Madame Manec says, "The frog cooks." ========== — Anonymous

All day Marie-Laure lies on her stomach and reads. Logic, reason, pure science: these, Aronnax insists, are the proper ways to pursue a mystery. Not fables and fairy tales. — Anthony Doerr

If only life were like a Jules Verne novel, thinks Marie-Laure, and you could page ahead when you most needed to, and learn what would happen. — Anthony Doerr

Eggs crack. Butter pops in a hot pan. Soon all of Marie-Laure's attention is absorbed by the smells blooming around her: egg, spinach, melting cheese. An omelette arrives. The eggs taste like clouds. Like spun gold. Marie-Laure can hear a can opening, juice slopping into a bowl. Seconds later she is eating wedges of wet sunlight. — Doerr Anthony

Marie-Laure sits in her customary spot in the corner of the kitchen, closest to the fireplace, and listens to the friends of Melanie Manec complain ... Nine of them sit around the square table, knees pressed to knees. Ration card restrictions, abysmal puddings, the deteriorating quality of fingernail varnish - these are crimes they feel in their souls. To hear so many of them in a room together confuses and excites Marie-Laure: they are giddy when they should be serious, somber after jokes; Madame Hebrard cries over the nonavailability of Demerara sugar, another woman's complaint about tobacco disintegrates mid sentence into hysterics about the phenomenal size of the perfumer's backside. They smell of stale bread, of stuffy living rooms crammed with dark titanic Breton furnishings. — Anthony Doerr

Werner looks at the blue of the walls and thinks of Birds of America, yellow-crowned heron, Kentucky warbler, scarlet tanager, bird after glorious bird, and Frederick's gaze remains stuck in some terrible middle ground, each eye a stagnant pool into which Werner cannot bear to look. Relapse In late June 1942, for the first time since her fever, Madame Manec is not in the kitchen when Marie-Laure wakes. — Anthony Doerr

He waits until dark. Marie-Laure sits in the mouth of the wardrobe, the false back open, and listens to her uncle switch on the microphone and the transmitter in the attic. His mild voice speaks numbers into the garret. Then music plays, soft and low, full of cellos tonight . . . — Anthony Doerr

Marie-Laure drops her cane; she begins to cry. Her father lifts her, holds her to his narrow chest. "it's so big," she whispers. "You can do this, Marie." She cannot. — Anthony Doerr

Madams Manec's energy, Marie-Lauren is learning, is extraordinary; she burgeons, shoots off stalks, wakes early, works late, concocts basques without a drop of cream, loaves with less than a cup of flour. They clomp together through the narrow streets, Marie-Laure's hand on the back of Madame's apron, following the odors of her stews and cakes; in such moments Madame seems like a great moving wall of rose bushes, thorny and fragrant and crackling with bees. — Anthony Doerr

It is nothing, Marie-Laure. Come now." Marie-Laure backs out. Below her, her great-uncle whispers nursery rhymes to himself. "I can sit with him for a bit, Madame. Maybe we could read some more of our — Anthony Doerr

Marie-Laure smiles, and he laughs a pure, contagious laugh, one she will try to remember all her life, father and daughter turning in circles on the sidewalk in front of their apartment house, laughing together while snow sifts through the branches above. — Anthony Doerr

They clomp together through the narrow streets, Marie-Laure's hand on the back of Madame's apron, following the odors of her stews and cakes; in such moments Madame seems like a great moving wall of rosebushes, thorny and fragrant and crackling with bees. Still-warm — 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

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