Top 500 Anthony Doerr Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “Then the short man disappears through the huge doors. Minutes later, the aide-de-camp flings open the shutters of an upstairs window and gazes a moment across the rooftops before unfurling a crimson flag over the brick and securing its eyelets to the sill.”

— Anthony Doerr

452. “There has always been a sliver of panic in him, deeply buried, when it comes to his daughter: a fear that he is no good as a father, that he is doing everything wrong. That he never quite understood the rules.”

— Anthony Doerr

453. “She can hear the bombers when they are three miles away. A mounting static. The hum inside a seashell.”

— Anthony Doerr

454. “All of it is burning. Every memory he ever made.”

— Anthony Doerr

455. “It is as if he has been drowning for as long as he can remember and somebody has fetched him up for air.”

— Anthony Doerr

456. “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

457. “But the moonlight stays unmoved by the wind, passing through clouds, through air, in what seems to Werner like impossibly slow, imperturbable rays. They hang across the buckling grass. Why doesn’t the wind move the light?”

— Anthony Doerr

458. “The wizard laughed. “Even if you grew wings, foolish fish, you could not fly to a place that is not real.” “Wrong,” I said, “it does exist. Even if you don’t believe in it, I do. Otherwise what’s it all been for?”

— Anthony Doerr

459. “The tide climbs. The moon hangs small and yellow and gibbous. On the rooftops of beachfront hotels to the east, and in the gardens behind them, a half-dozen American artillery units drop incendiary rounds into the mouths of mortars.”

— Anthony Doerr

460. “You are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to nobody!”

— Anthony Doerr

461. “A single fruit fly in his wine can send a black thread twisting through his mood that lingers for days. Widow Theodora says that Kalaphates needs compassion, that the remedy to every woe is prayer, and after dark Maria kneels in their cell in front of the icon of Saint Koralia, her lips moving silently, sending devotions up past the beams.”

— Anthony Doerr

462. “There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.”

— Anthony Doerr

463. “None more complicated than the human brain, Etienne would say, what may be the most complex object in existence; one wet kilogram within which spin universes.”

— Anthony Doerr

464. “Everyone should behave as if he carries the real thing.”

— Anthony Doerr

465. “She stands alone in Madame Manec’s room and smells peppermint, candle wax, six decades of loyalty. Housemaid, nurse, mother, confederate, counselor, chef – what ten thousand things was Madame Manec to Etienne?”

— Anthony Doerr

466. “The premier achievement of human history, they said, the triumph of memory over the obliterating forces of destruction and erasure.”

— Anthony Doerr

467. “Smart beyond your years. There are places for a boy like you.”

— Anthony Doerr

468. “Rain falls so lightly that it seems indistinguishable from fog.”

— Anthony Doerr

469. “It’s as if the city has become a library of books in an unknown language, the houses great shelves of illegible volumes, the lamps all extinguished.”

— Anthony Doerr

470. “Three a lucky number, Chryse always said: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Birth, life, death. Past, present, future.”

— Anthony Doerr

471. “I,” she says, “am Aethon, a simple shepherd from Arkadia, and –.”

— Anthony Doerr

472. “We are dust only after all our water evaporates.”

— Anthony Doerr

473. “To really touch something, is to love it.”

— Anthony Doerr

474. “Violins, horns, drums, speeches – a mouth against a microphone in some faraway yet simultaneous evening – the sorcery of it holds him rapt.”

— Anthony Doerr

475. “It’s all right,” he told her. “Things hardly ever work on the first try. We’ll make another, a better one.”

— Anthony Doerr

476. “There are a thousand metaphors and all of them are inadequate.”

— Anthony Doerr

477. “Did time move forward, through people, or did people move through it, like clouds across the sky?”

— Anthony Doerr

478. “I am quite gifted at waiting.”

— Anthony Doerr

479. “A second birth,” Maria Montessori called it, when a child can move away from his mother on his own. And indeed Owen does seem like a new child, rarely crying, constantly at work on getting himself somewhere else.”

— Anthony Doerr

480. “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

481. “They can march for days without eating. They impregnate every schoolgirl they meet.”

— Anthony Doerr

482. “In stormy light, its granite glows blue. At the highest tides, the sea creeps into basements at the very center of town. At the lowest tides, the barnacled ribs of a thousand shipwrecks stick out above the sea.”

— Anthony Doerr

483. “That little rock you’re so curious about may have seen Alaric sack Rome; it may have glittered in the eyes of Pharaohs. Scythian queens might have danced all night wearing it. Wars might have been fought over it.”

— Anthony Doerr

484. “She promises Etienne she will remember her age, not try to be everything to everyone, not fight the war by herself.”

— Anthony Doerr

485. “Werner looks up at the stone houses arrayed wall to wall, tall and aloof, their faces damp, their windows dark. No lamplight anywhere. No antennas. The rain falls so softly, almost soundlessly, but to Werner it roars.”

— Anthony Doerr

486. “She clutches the sack. West, she thinks, this is all she knows, west where the sun goes down, west across the Propontis, and her mind sends up visions of the blessed island of Scheria, and of the bright oil and soft bread of Urbino, and of Aethon’s city in the clouds, each paradise blurring into the last. It does exist, Aethon-the-fish told the wizard inside the whale. Otherwise what’s it all been for?”

— Anthony Doerr

487. “One section of the old city, tucked against the western walls, becomes a firestorm in which the spires of flames, at their highest, reach three hundred feet. The appetite for oxygen is such that objects heavier than housecats are dragged into the flames.”

— Anthony Doerr

488. “Thermal scanners? Laser sights? Above the junipers, a trio of blue lights hover: some kind of remote-controlled drone. These, the creatures we have chosen to repopulate the earth.”

— Anthony Doerr

489. “How much oxygen does a person’s respiratory system exchange for carbon dioxide every hour?”

— Anthony Doerr

490. “The sky drops silver threads of sleet.”

— Anthony Doerr

491. “Stones are just stone an rain is just rain and misfortune is just bad luck. Some things are simply more rare than others, and that’s why there are locks.”

— Anthony Doerr

492. “A spark in the night.”

— Anthony Doerr

493. “From a certain angle, the spring seems so calm: warm, tender, each night redolent and composed. And yet everything radiates tension, as if the city has been built upon the skin of a balloon and someone is inflating it to the breaking point.”

— Anthony Doerr

494. “The girl climbs into the swing and pendulums back and forth, pumping her legs, and watching her opens some valve in Werner’s soul. This is life, he thinks, this is why we live, to play like this on a day when winter is finally releasing its grip.”

— Anthony Doerr

495. “How do they know what parts to play, those little bees?”

— Anthony Doerr

496. “Maybe he needs only to hear a flicker of hope.”

— Anthony Doerr

497. “Wasn’t it possible that he was carrying out some secret mission completely unknown to me?”

— Anthony Doerr

498. “Hers is a low voice, full of pebbles – a sailor’s voice or a smoker’s.”

— Anthony Doerr

499. “Werner Pfennig grows up three hundred miles northeast of Paris in a place called Zollverein: a four-thousand-acre coalmining complex outside Essen, Germany. It’s steel country, anthracite country, a place full of holes. Smokestacks fume and locomotives trundle back and forth on elevated conduits and leafless trees stand atop slag heaps like skeleton hands shoved up from the underworld.”

— Anthony Doerr

500. “In the candlelight, she looks of another world, her face all freckles, and in the center of the freckles those two eyes hang unmoving like the egg cases of spiders. They do not track him, but they do not unnerve him, either; they seem almost to see into a separate, deeper place, a world that consists only of music.”

— Anthony Doerr