Top 500 Anthony Doerr Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.”

— Anthony Doerr

2. “Don’t you want to be alive before you die?”

— Anthony Doerr

3. “Things hardly ever work on the first try. We’ll make another, a better one.”

— Anthony Doerr

4. “So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?”

— Anthony Doerr

5. “A real diamond is never perfect.”

— Anthony Doerr

6. “Is it right,” Jutta says, “to do something only because everyone else is doing it?”

— Anthony Doerr

7. “Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.”

— Anthony Doerr

8. “You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.”

— Anthony Doerr

9. “We live through books; we have adventures in them, we lead alternative lives through them. We expand our memories through them. And that sometimes art can offer us more intense experiences of the world than life itself can.”

— Anthony Doerr

10. “Sometimes the eye of a hurricane is the safest place to be.”

— Anthony Doerr

11. “It’s not a person you wish to fight, Madame, it’s a system. How do you fight a system?” “You try.”

— Anthony Doerr

12. “Walk the paths of logic. Every outcome has its cause, and every predicament has its solution. Every lock its key.”

— Anthony Doerr

13. “The entropy of a closed system never decreases. Every process must by law decay.”

— Anthony Doerr

14. “Only Numbers. Pure math. You have to accustom yourself to thinking that way.”

— Anthony Doerr

15. “My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.”

— Anthony Doerr

16. “Her voice like a bright, clear window of sky. Her face a field of freckles. He thinks: I don’t want to let you go.”

— Anthony Doerr

17. “Doing nothing is as good as collaborating.”

— Anthony Doerr

18. “In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.”

— Anthony Doerr

19. “What you already have is better than what you so desperately seek.”

— Anthony Doerr

20. “Ordnung muss sein.”

— Anthony Doerr

21. “The Goddess of History looked down to earth. Only through the hottest fires can purification be achieved.”

— Anthony Doerr

22. “See obstacles as opportunities, Reinhold. See obstacles as inspirations.”

— Anthony Doerr

23. “Why else do any of this if not to become who we want to be?”

— Anthony Doerr

24. “We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.”

— Anthony Doerr

25. “It’s embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.”

— Anthony Doerr

26. “I will never leave you, not in a million years.”

— Anthony Doerr

27. “Your problem, Werner,” says Frederick, “is that you still believe you own your life.”

— Anthony Doerr

28. “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?”

— Anthony Doerr

29. “We all grew up before we were grown up.”

— Anthony Doerr

30. “He sees what other people don’t.” What the war did to dreamers.”

— Anthony Doerr

31. “You must never stop believing. That’s the most important thing.”

— Anthony Doerr

32. “War, Etienne thinks distantly, is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity:.”

— Anthony Doerr

33. “Nothing will be healed in this kitchen. Some griefs can never be put right... She only wants a tide of normality to wash in and cover everything again.”

— Anthony Doerr

34. “It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio. – Joseph Goebbels.”

— Anthony Doerr

35. “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

36. “Do you think, Madame, that in heaven we will really get to see God face-to-face?” “We might.” “What if you’re blind?” “I’d expect that if God wants us to see something, we’ll see it.”

— Anthony Doerr

37. “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

38. “I’m thankful that everything sweet is sweet because it is finite.”

— Anthony Doerr

39. “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

40. “The things we see are only masks for the things we can’t see.”

— Anthony Doerr

41. “Tucked between the last two pages, she finds an old sealed envelope. He has written For Frederick across the front. Frederick: the bunkmate Werner used to write about, the boy who loved birds. He sees what other people don’t. What the war did to dreamers.”

— Anthony Doerr

42. “You know how diamonds – how all crystals – grow, Laurette? By adding microscopic layers, a few thousand atoms every month, each atop the next. Millennia after millennia. That’s how stories accumulate too.”

— Anthony Doerr

43. “You have to trust someone sometime.”

— Anthony Doerr

44. “Don’t tell lies. Lie to yourself, Werner, but don’t lie to me.”

— Anthony Doerr

45. “Werner lunges for Volkheimer’s rifle. All your life you wait, and then it finally comes, and are you ready?”

— Anthony Doerr

46. “How few days are left in the lives of anyone. How few hours.”

— Anthony Doerr

47. “Death’s success rate has been 100% so far, yet we still choose to call it a mystery.”

— Anthony Doerr

48. “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

49. “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

50. “At dusk they pour from the sky. They blow across the ramparts, turn cartwheels over rooftops, flutter into the ravines between houses. Entire streets swirl with them, flashing white against the cobbles. Urgent message to the inhabitants of this town, they say. Depart immediately to open country.”

— Anthony Doerr