Anthony Doerr Quotes

“...she is as inescapable as a moon.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“The voice is like something from a long-ago dream.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“...she loves to ask them about their lives, to wonder what adventures they've had, what lusts, what secret follies they carry in their hearts.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Maybe he needs only to hear a flicker of hope.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“...clinging to a dream he does not want to leave.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“There there is music, almost always music.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“As if every living thing rushes to establish a foothold before some cataclysm arrives.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Right now the shadows of clouds are dragging across it, and patches of sunlight are touching down everywhere.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Wasn't it possible that he was carrying out some secret mission completely unknown to me?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“...make the raised dots form letters, the letters words, the words a world.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Or maybe the stone was never real at all. Maybe it was all hoax, all story.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Beyond the broken window hangs a windless night. Ashes swirling in starlight.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“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, All the Light We Cannot See

“...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?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“I suppose that is the point, no? To make us wonder?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“It's all right," he told her. "Things hardly ever work on the first try. We'll make another, a better one.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“But on most days, especially the warm ones, life exhausts him; the worsening traffic and graffiti and company politics, everyone grousing about bonuses, benefits, overtime.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“She does not want to be one of those middle-aged women who thinks of nothing but her own painful history.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“When they were first married and Albert went away on trips for work, Jutta would wake in the predawn hours and remember those first nights after Werner left for Schulpforta and feel all over again the searing pain of his absence.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“When lightning strikes the sea, why don't all the fish die?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“...and she is so afraid to try her French that she goes to bed hungry.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Mutti, what goes around the world but stays in a corner?"

"I don't know, Max."

"A postage stamp.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“...with a prodigious curiosity but little perseverance.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“We all grew up before we we're grown up.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Where did the boy fit? He made such a faint presence. It was like being in the room with a feather. But his soul glowed with some fundamental kindness, didn't it?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Beneath her fingernails, the frost makes billions of tiny diadems and coronas on the slats of the bench, a lattice of dumbfounding complexity.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“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, All the Light We Cannot See