Top 500 Anthony Doerr Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “There is only chance in this world, chance and physics.”

— Anthony Doerr

102. “He looks across to the fires. He thinks: The universe is full of fuel.”

— Anthony Doerr

103. “Still,” he says, “certain things compel people. Pearls, for example, and sinistral shells, shells with a left-handed opening. Even the best scientists feel the urge now and then to put something in a pocket. That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much. Only the strongest people can turn away from feelings like that.”

— Anthony Doerr

104. “Those last nights in Paris, walking home with her father at midnight, the huge book clasped against her chest, Marie-Laure thinks she can sense a shiver beneath the air, in the pauses between the chirring of the insects, like the spider cracks of ice when too much weight is set upon it. As if all this time the city has been no more than a scale model built by her father and the shadow of a great hand has fallen over it.”

— Anthony Doerr

105. “Is she happy? For portions of every day, she is happy.”

— Anthony Doerr

106. “Time slows. The attic disappears. Jutta disappears. Has anyone ever spoken so intimately about the very things Werner is most curious about? Open.”

— Anthony Doerr

107. “There is a humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing. That’s how it feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing her hair: as though his lve for his daughter will outstrip the limits of his body. The walls could fall away, even the whole city, and the brightness of that feeling would not wane.”

— Anthony Doerr

108. “Frau Elena, does a bee know it’s going to die if it stings somebody?”

— Anthony Doerr

109. “The despair doesn’t last. Marie-Laure is too young and her father is too patient.”

— Anthony Doerr

110. “And yet everything radiates tension, as if the city has been built upon the skin of a balloon and someone is inflating it toward the breaking point.”

— Anthony Doerr

111. “A scientist’s work, cadet, is determined by two things. His interests and the interests of his time. Do.”

— Anthony Doerr

112. “She has no memories of her mother but imagines her as white, a soundless brilliance. Her father radiates a thousand colors, opal, strawberry red, deep russet, wild green; a smell like oil and metal, the feel of a lock tumbler sliding home, the sound of his key rings chiming as he walks.”

— Anthony Doerr

113. “He is a ghost. He is from some other world. He is Papa, Madame Manec, Etienne; he is everyone who has left her finally coming back.”

— Anthony Doerr

114. “It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history.”

— Anthony Doerr

115. “Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor-it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.”

— Anthony Doerr

116. “Some griefs can never be put right.”

— Anthony Doerr

117. “What the war did to dreamers.”

— Anthony Doerr

118. “We are mice, he thinks, and the sky swirls with hawks.”

— Anthony Doerr

119. “Marie-Laure smiles, and he laughs a pure, contagious laugh, one she will try to remember all her life, father and daughter turning in circles on the sidewalk in front of their apartment house, laughing together while snow sifts through the branches above.”

— Anthony Doerr

120. “It doesn’t matter what I want.” “Of course it matters. I want to be an engineer. And you want to study birds. Be like that American painter in the swamps. Why else do any of this if not to become who we want to be?”

— Anthony Doerr

121. “Marie-Laure sits among them, wondering who will cave, who will tattle, who will be the bravest. Who will lie on her back and let her last breath curl up to the ceiling as a curse upon the invaders.”

— Anthony Doerr

122. “That Dr. Hauptmann might have ties so far up – that the telephone on his desk connects him with men a hundred miles away who could probably wag a finger and send a dozen Messerschmitts streaming up from an airfield to strafe some city – intoxicates Werner. We live in exceptional times.”

— Anthony Doerr

123. “Men cluster to me like moths around a flame, and if their wings burn, I know I’m not to blame.”

— Anthony Doerr

124. “The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light.”

— Anthony Doerr

125. “Rome is a broken mirror, the falling straps of a dress, a puzzle of astonishing complexity. It is an iceberg floating below our terrace, all its ballasts hidden beneath the surface.”

— Anthony Doerr

126. “Who will lie on her back and let her last breath curl up to the ceiling as a curse upon the invaders.”

— Anthony Doerr

127. “And yet she can tell he is visited by fears so immense, so multiple, that she can almost feel the terror pulsing inside him. As though some beast breathes all the time at the windowpanes of his mind.”

— Anthony Doerr

128. “Nearly every species that has ever lived has gone extinct, Laurette. No reason to think we humans will be any different!”

— Anthony Doerr

129. “In the infinite permutation of an ice crystal, everything repeats itself, but, really, from another point of view, nothing repeats itself.”

— Anthony Doerr

130. “The way she tucks her ankles up against her bottom. The way her fingers flutter through the space around her. Each a thing he hopes never to forget.”

— Anthony Doerr

131. “Number 4: the tall, derelict bird’s nest of a house owned by her great-uncle Etienne. Where she has lived for four years. Where she kneels on the sixth floor alone, as a dozen American bombers roar toward her.”

— Anthony Doerr

132. “The window glows. The slow sandy light of dawn permeates the room. Everything transient and aching; everything tentative. To be here, in this room, high in this house, out of the cellar, with her: it is like medicine.”

— Anthony Doerr

133. “Madams Manec’s energy, Marie-Lauren is learning, is extraordinary; she burgeons, shoots off stalks, wakes early, works late, concocts basques without a drop of cream, loaves with less than a cup of flour. They clomp together through the narrow streets, Marie-Laure’s hand on the back of Madame’s apron, following the odors of her stews and cakes; in such moments Madame seems like a great moving wall of rose bushes, thorny and fragrant and crackling with bees.”

— Anthony Doerr

134. “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

135. “I thought they might take a break,” he says. Marie-Laure is thinking of her father. “Maybe,” she says, “it is even more important now?”

— Anthony Doerr

136. “He blinks; he has to swallow back tears. The parlor looks the same as it always has: two cribs beneath two Latin crosses, dust floating in the open mouth of the stove, a dozen layers of paint peeling off the baseboards. A needlepoint of Frau Elena’s snowy Alsatian village above the sink. Yet now there is music. As if, inside Werner’s head, an infinitesimal orchestra has stirred to life.”

— Anthony Doerr

137. “We’re in Borneo, can’t you tell? We’re skimming the treetops now, big leaves are glimmering below us, and there are coffee bushes over there, smell them?” and Marie-Laure will indeed smell something, whether because her uncle is passing coffee grounds beneath her nose, or because they really are flying over the coffee trees of Borneo, she does not want to decide.”

— Anthony Doerr

138. “There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing.”

— Anthony Doerr

139. “The very life of any creature is a quick-fading spark in fathomless darkness.”

— Anthony Doerr

140. “O take me, take me up into the ranks so that I do not die a common death! I do not want to die in vain, what I want is to fall on the sacrificial mound.”

— Anthony Doerr

141. “The moonlight shines and billows; the broken clouds scud above the trees. Leaves fly everywhere. 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

142. “Hardly a couple of ounces of feathers and bones. But that bird can fly to Africa and back. Powered by bugs and worms and desire.”

— Anthony Doerr

143. “Uncle Etienne says heaven is like a blanket babies cling to.”

— Anthony Doerr

144. “We spent a month there. I think he might have fallen in love.” Jutta sits straighter in her chair. It’s embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is. A town on the northern coast of France? Love? Nothing will be healed in this kitchen. Some griefs can never be put right.”

— Anthony Doerr

145. “On the rue de la Crosse, the Hotel of Bees becomes almost weightless for a moment, lifted in a spiral of flame, before it begins to rain the pieces back to the earth.”

— Anthony Doerr

146. “We act in the interest of peace.”

— Anthony Doerr

147. “It doesn’t hurt, she explains. And there is no darkness, not the kind they imagine. Everything is composed of webs and lattices and upheavals of sound and texture.”

— Anthony Doerr

148. “Who knew love could kill you?”

— Anthony Doerr

149. “Every rumor carries a seed of truth, Etienne.”

— Anthony Doerr

150. “Don’t you miss the world?” He is quiet; so is she. Both ride spirals of memory.”

— Anthony Doerr