Top 500 Anthony Doerr Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “We are dust only after all our water evaporates.”

— Anthony Doerr

452. “De entre todas las cosas que he visto en la vida, creo que el mar es mi favorita.”

— Anthony Doerr

453. “Forgetting, he is learning, is how the world heals itself.”

— Anthony Doerr

454. “Each of these books, child, is a door, a gateway to another place and time. You have your whole life in front of you, and for all of it, you’ll have this. It will be enough, don’t you think?”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

456. “Almost overnight, the streets glow with meaning. She reads inscriptions on coins, on cornerstones and tombstones, on lead seals and buttress piers and marble plaques embedded into the defensive walls – each twisting lane of the city a great battered manuscript in its own right.”

— Anthony Doerr

457. “The only sound is the patter of the rain turning Saint-Malo into mud.”

— Anthony Doerr

458. “A moment like this – the four of them around the table under the sad, dusty kitchen lamp – could never accommodate all the things she had to say.”

— Anthony Doerr

459. “Singular and plural, noun stems and verb cases: Rex’s enthusiasm for ancient Greek carries them through the worst hours.”

— Anthony Doerr

460. “Anna remembers something Licinius said: that a story is a way of stretching time.”

— Anthony Doerr

461. “The wheeling of the night on its silent trunnions.”

— Anthony Doerr

462. “Logic. The principles of validity. Every lock has its key.”

— Anthony Doerr

463. “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

464. “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.”

— Anthony Doerr

465. “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

466. “And as he looked, turning the leaf over and back, Aethon saw that the cities on both sides of the page, the dark ones and the bright ones, were one and the same, that there is no peace without war, no life without death, and he was afraid.”

— Anthony Doerr

467. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

469. “A spark in the night.”

— Anthony Doerr

470. “The last of autumn’s leaves spiraling to earth.”

— Anthony Doerr

471. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

473. “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

474. “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

475. “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

476. “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

477. “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

478. “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

479. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

481. “The others in my cell are mostly kind. Some tell jokes. Here’s one: Have you heard about the Wehrmacht exercise program? Yes, each morning you raise your hands above your head and leave them there!”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

485. “Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

488. “How do men convince themselves that others must die so they might live?”

— Anthony Doerr

489. “There are many people in this world,” Himerius says, “who do not care to what purposes their engines are put. So long as they are paid.”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

491. “The goddess tells the lonely sailor not to be afraid, that it is better to be brave in all things.”

— Anthony Doerr

492. “I am quite gifted at waiting.”

— Anthony Doerr

493. “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

494. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

496. “All your life you wait, and then it finally comes, and are you ready?”

— Anthony Doerr

497. “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

498. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

500. “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