Top 500 Anthony Doerr Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “How? How did Jutta understand so much more about how the world worked? While he knew so little?”

— Anthony Doerr

152. “It took me about three years to write About Grace. I wasn’t teaching two of those years, so I was working eight-hour days, five days a week. And it would include research and reading – it wasn’t just a blank page, laying down words.”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

154. “Everyone should behave as if he carries the real thing. The locksmith reties the stone inside the bag and slips it back into his rucksack.”

— Anthony Doerr

155. “Her fingers travel back to the cathedral spire. South to the Gate of Dinan. All evening she has been marching her fingers around the model, waiting for her great-uncle Etienne, who owns this house, who went out the previous night while she slept, and who has not returned. And now it is night again, another revolution of the clock, and the whole block is quiet, and she cannot sleep.”

— Anthony Doerr

156. “Werner’s favorite is one about light: eclipses and sundials, auroras and wavelengths. What do we call visible light? We call it color. But the electromagnetic spectrum runs to zero in one direction and infinity in the other, so really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.”

— Anthony Doerr

157. “It’s 1940 and no one laughs at the Hitler Youth now.”

— Anthony Doerr

158. “Stick-thin, alabaster-pale Etienne LeBlanc runs down the rue de Dinan with Madame Ruelle, the baker’s wife, on his heels: the least-robust rescue ever assembled.”

— Anthony Doerr

159. “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. All the old stones accumulate stories. 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

160. “A girl got kicked out of the swimming hole today. Inge Hachmann. They said they wouldn’t let us swim with a half-breed. Unsanitary. A half-breed, Werner. Aren’t we half-breeds too? Aren’t we half our mother, half our father?”

— Anthony Doerr

161. “He was a just a boy. They all were. Even the largest of them.”

— Anthony Doerr

162. “First we die, the woman says. “Then our bodies are buried. So we die two deaths.” “Then in another world, folded inside the living world, we wait. We wait until everyone who knew us when we were children has died. And then the last of them dies, we finally die our third death.”

— Anthony Doerr

163. “The city, thinks Marie-Laure, is slowly being remade into the model upstairs. Streets sucked empty one by one.”

— Anthony Doerr

164. “She reaches for his hand, sets something in his palm, and squeezes his hand into a fist. “Goodbye, Werner.” “Goodbye, Marie-Laure.”

— Anthony Doerr

165. “What do you seek, little snail? Do you live only in this one moment, or do you worry like Professor Aronnax for your future?”

— Anthony Doerr

166. “Hope was a sunrise, a friend in the alley, a whisper in an empty corridor.”

— Anthony Doerr

167. “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

168. “Seventy-six years old,” she whispers, “and I can still feel like this? Like a little girl with stars in my eyes?”

— Anthony Doerr

169. “Where do memories go once we’ve lost our ability to summon them? It.”

— Anthony Doerr

170. “The entropy of a closed system never decreases.”

— Anthony Doerr

171. “Not-knowing is always more thrilling than knowing. Not-knowing is where hope and art and possibility and invention come from. It is not-knowing, that old, old thing, that allows everything to be renewed.”

— Anthony Doerr

172. “Nearly every species that has ever lived has gone extinct, Laurette. No reason to think we humans will be any different!” Dr. Geffard pronounces this almost gleefully and pours wine into his glass, and she imagines his head as a cabinet filled with ten thousand little drawers.”

— Anthony Doerr

173. “Now it is as if she can hear the pendulum in the air in front of her: that huge golden bob, as wide across as a barrel, swinging on and on, never stopping. Grooving and regrooving its inhuman truth into the floor.”

— Anthony Doerr

174. “Each story Werner hears contains its own flaws and contradictions, as though the truth is a machine whose gears are not meshing.”

— Anthony Doerr

175. “But over these past few weeks, her existence has become tolerable. At least, out on the beaches, her privation and fear are rinsed away by wind and color and light. Most.”

— Anthony Doerr

176. “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

177. “She is in charge of everything, but no one knows. It is a tremendous burden, she says, to be responsible for every little thing, every infant born, every leaf falling from every tree, every wave that breaks onto the beach, every ant on its journey.”

— Anthony Doerr

178. “Don’t tell me how to grieve. Don’t tell me ghosts fade away eventually, like they do in movies, waving goodbye with see-through hands. Lots of things fade away but ghosts like these don’t, heartbreak like this doesn’t. The axe blade is still as sharp and real inside me as it was six months ago. I.”

— Anthony Doerr

179. “He wants to tell her that when things vanish they become something else, in death we rise again in the blades of grass, the splitting bodies of seeds.”

— Anthony Doerr

180. “Isn’t doing nothing a kind of troublemaking?”

— Anthony Doerr

181. “The bony figure of Death rides the streets below, stopping his mount now and then to peer into windows. Horns of fire on his head and smoke leaking from his nostrils and, in his skeletal hand, a list of newly charged with addresses.”

— Anthony Doerr

182. “It’s the absence of all the bodies, she thinks, that allows us to forget. It’s that the sod seals them over.”

— Anthony Doerr

183. “Flowers grow on her tiny wrought-iron balcony, and in summer she can estimate what time of day it is by feeling how wide the petals of the evening primroses have opened.”

— Anthony Doerr

184. “It was enough when Werner was a boy, wasn’t it? A world of wildflowers blooming up through the shapes of rusty cast-off parts. A world of berries and carrot peels and Frau Elena’s fairy tales. Of the sharp smell of tar, and trains passing, and bees humming in the window boxes. String and spit and wire and a voice on the radio offering a loom on which to spin his dreams.”

— Anthony Doerr

185. “Out here the prisoners see the shells smash into the city before they hear them. During the last war, Etienne knew artillerymen who could peer through field glasses and discern their shells’ damage by the colors thrown skyward. Gray was stone. Brown was soil. Pink was flesh.”

— Anthony Doerr

186. “Marie-Laure can hear a can opening, juice slopping into a bowl. Seconds later, she’s eating wedges of wet sunlight.”

— Anthony Doerr

187. “Only through the hottest fires, whispers the radio, can purification be achieved. Only through the harshest tests can God’s chosen rise.”

— Anthony Doerr

188. “The years passed as clouds do, ephemeral and vaporous, condensing, sliding along awhile, then dispersing like ghosts.”

— Anthony Doerr

189. “The locusts have no king, yet all of them go out in ranks.”

— Anthony Doerr

190. “Now the piano makes a long, familiar run, the pianist playing different scales with each hand – what sounds like three hands, four – the harmonies like steadily thickening peals on a strand, and Werner sees six-year-old Jutta lean toward him, Frau Elena kneading bread in the background, a crystal radio in his lap, the cords of his soul not yet severed.”

— Anthony Doerr

191. “But seven-year-old Werner seems to float. He is undersized and his ears stick out and he speaks with a high, sweet voice; the whiteness of his hair stops people in their tracks. Snowy, milky, chalky. A color that is the absence of color. Every morning he ties his shoes, packs newspaper inside his coat as insulation against the cold, and begins interrogating the world.”

— Anthony Doerr

192. “The vice minister sets down The Principles of Mechanics and pushes it away, then glances at his palms as though it has made them dirty. He says, “The only place your brother is going, little girl, is into the mines. As soon as he turns fifteen. Same as every other boy in this house.”

— Anthony Doerr

193. “The girl sits very still in the corner and wraps her coat around her knees. 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

194. “Ready?” He sounds like her father when he was about to say something silly. In her memory, Marie-Laure hears the two policemen: People have been arrested for less. And Madame Manec: Don’t you want to be alive before you die? “Yes.”

— Anthony Doerr

195. “The soldiers throw a bag over whomever they want to remove, run electricity through him, and then that person is gone, vanished. Expelled to some other world.”

— Anthony Doerr

196. “Volkheimer’s eyes open as wide as they can. Straining the blackness for every stray photon. A single piano runs up scales. Then back down. He listens to the notes and the silences between them, and then finds himself leading horses through a forest at dawn, trudging through snow behind his great-grandfather, who walks with a saw draped over his huge shoulders, the snow squeaking beneath boots and hooves, all the trees above them whispering and creaking.”

— Anthony Doerr

197. “Don’t you ever get tired of believing, Madame? Don’t you ever want proof?”

— Anthony Doerr

198. “But I wasn’t trying to reach England. Or Paris. I thought that if I made the broadcast powerful enough, my brother would hear me. That I could bring him some peace, protect him as he had always protected me.”

— Anthony Doerr

199. “God’s truth? How long do these intolerable moments last for God? A trillionth of second? The very life of any creature is a quick-fading spark in fathomless darkness. That’s God’s truth.”

— Anthony Doerr

200. “Am I following a path already laid out for me, or am I making it myself?”

— Anthony Doerr