Top 500 Anthony Doerr Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Electricity, Werner is learning, can be static by itself. But couple it with magnetism, and suddenly you have movement – waves. Fields and circuits, conduction and induction. Space, time, mass. The air swarms with so much that is invisible! How he wishes he had eyes to see the ultraviolet, eyes to see the infrared, eyes to see radio waves crowding the darkening sky, flashing through the walls of the house.”

— Anthony Doerr

152. “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

153. “Jutta drags herself closer; she watches her brother with outsize eyes. A piano chases the violins. Then woodwinds. The strings sprint, woodwinds fluttering behind. More instruments join in. Flutes? Harps? The song races, seems to loop back over itself. “Werner?” Jutta whispers. He blinks;.”

— 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. “German sailors sing a drunken song in the street, and a house spider over the stove spins a new web every night, and to Marie-Laure 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

157. “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

158. “The weather in this place, you can feel it between your fingers.”

— Anthony Doerr

159. “The star-flooded nights, the dew-soaked dawns, the hushed ambulatories, the enforced asceticism – never has Werner felt part of something so single-minded.”

— Anthony Doerr

160. “I’ll fly us west, you and me, Frau Elena too if she wants. Or we could take a train. We’ll ride through forests and villages de montagnes, all those places Frau Elena talked about when we were small. Maybe we could ride all the way to Paris.” The burgeoning light. The tender hissing of the grass. Jutta opens her eyes but doesn’t look at him. “Don’t tell lies. Lie to yourself, Werner, but don’t lie to me.”

— Anthony Doerr

161. “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

162. “How? How did Jutta understand so much more about how the world worked? While he knew so little?”

— Anthony Doerr

163. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

167. “Waiting is a kind of war. You simply tell yourself that you must not lose.”

— Anthony Doerr

168. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

170. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

173. “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

174. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

177. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

180. “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

181. “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

182. “Music spirals out of the radios, and it is splendid to drowse on the davenport, to be warm and fed, to feel the sentences hoist her up and carry her somewhere else.”

— Anthony Doerr

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “There are two kinds of death,” he says, the clouds of his breath plunging out into the cold. “You can fight like a lion. Or you can go as easy as lifting a hair from a cup of milk.”

— Anthony Doerr

189. “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

190. “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

191. “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

192. “How do you ever know for certain that you are doing the right thing?”

— Anthony Doerr

193. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

197. “The city, thinks Marie-Laure, is slowly being remade into the model upstairs. Streets sucked empty one by one. Each time she steps outside, she becomes aware of all the windows above her. The quiet is fretful, unnatural. It’s what a mouse must feel, she thinks, as it steps from its hole into the open blades of a meadow, never knowing what shadow might come cruising above.”

— Anthony Doerr

198. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

200. “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