Top 500 Anthony Doerr Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “I am quite gifted at waiting,” von Rumpel says in French. “It is my one great skill. I was never much good at athletics or mathematics, but even as a boy, I possessed unnatural patience. I would wait with my mother while she got her hair styled. I would sit in the chair and wait for hours, no magazine, no toys, not even swinging my legs back and forth. All the mothers were very impressed.”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

453. “Water droplets shine in his eyelashes. Dusk seeps down through the overcast and a slight chill drops into the air and one by one families leave to walk or bike or ride the bus home.”

— Anthony Doerr

454. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

456. “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

457. “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

458. “Opera houses! Cities on the moon! Ridiculous. They would all do better to put their faces on the curbs and wait for the boys who come through the city dragging sledges stacked with corpses.”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

462. “Her arms are wrapped around her head and her wool blanket is twisted around her midsection and her pillow is jammed into the crack between mattress and wall – even in sleep, a tableau of friction.”

— Anthony Doerr

463. “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

464. “It was the summer when fireflies showed up in Saint-Malo, and their father was very excited, building long-handled nets for his boys and giving them jars with wire to fasten over the tops, and Etienne and Henri raced through the tall grass as the fireflies floated away from them, illuming on and off, always seeming to rise just beyond their reach, as if the earth were smoldering and these were sparks that their footfalls had prodded free.”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

466. “A spark in the night.”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

468. “Why bother to make music when the silence and wind are so much larger? Why light lamps when the darkness will inevitably snuff them? When Russian prisoners are chained by threes and fours to fences while German privates tuck live grenades in their pockets and run?”

— Anthony Doerr

469. “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

470. “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

471. “Madame Ruelle, the baker’s wife – a pretty-voiced woman who smells mostly of yeast but also sometimes of face powder or the sweet perfume of sliced apples – straps a stepladder to the roof of her husband’s car and drives the Route de Carentan at dusk with Madame Guiboux and rearranges road signs with a ratchet set.”

— Anthony Doerr

472. “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

473. “A child is born, and the world sets in upon it. Taking things from it, stuffing things into it. Each bite of food, each particle of light entering the eye – the body can never be pure. But this is what the.”

— Anthony Doerr

474. “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

475. “Antiquity was invented to be the bread of librarians and schoolmasters.”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

479. “Fog on the sea, fog in the streets, fog in the mind.”

— Anthony Doerr

480. “Don’t be so quick to dismiss yourself,” he says. “Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

482. “A good journal entry – like a good song, or sketch, or photograph – ought to break up the habitual and lift away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought be a love letter to the world. Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience – buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello – become new all over again.”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

484. “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

485. “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

486. “There, thinks Werner when he finds it again, there: a feeling like shutting your eyes and feeling your way down a mile-long thread until your fingernails find the tiny lump of a knot.”

— Anthony Doerr

487. “Swifts, flushed from chimneys, catch fire and swoop like blown sparks out over the ramparts and extinguish themselves in the sea.”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

490. “Why can’t healing happen as quickly as wounding?”

— Anthony Doerr

491. “Stillness: this is what he radiates more than anything else. The stillness of a tree. Of a mouse blinking in the dark.”

— Anthony Doerr

492. “Every afternoon, whatever the weather, he stands in a field bawling state-sown dicta: “Prosperity depends on ferocity. The only things that keep your precious grandmothers in their tea and cookies are the fists at the end of your arms.”

— Anthony Doerr

493. “He found himself thinking of water, how it is never still, how even in our bodies water never relents: ceaselessly vibrating, each electron in each molecule in each cell orbiting, spinning, nine independent vectors of position and force, a rapture of movement.”

— Anthony Doerr

494. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

496. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr