Top 500 Anthony Doerr Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Don’t you ever get tired of believing, Madame? Don’t you ever want proof?”

— Anthony Doerr

202. “Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history.”

— Anthony Doerr

203. “Two women leave, claiming obligations involving grandchildren. Others tug at their blouses and rattle their chairs as though the temperature of the kitchen has gone up. Six remain. 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

204. “As I work on yet another draft of my story, I try to remember these lessons. A journal entry is for its writer; it helps its writer refine, perceive, and process the world. But a story – a finished piece of writing – is for its reader; it should help its reader refine, perceive, and process the world – the one particular world of the story, which.”

— Anthony Doerr

205. “He and Werner eat their first meal in their starchy new uniforms at a long wooden table in the refectory. Some boys talk in whispers, some sit alone, some gulp food as if they have not eaten in days. Through three arched windows, dawn sends a sheaf of hallowed golden rays. Frederick flutters his fingers and asks, “Do you like birds?” “Sure.” “Do you know about hooded crows?”

— Anthony Doerr

206. “He takes her hand to help her over the piles. No shells fall and no rifles crack and the light is soft and shot through with ash. Jutta, he thinks, I finally listened.”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

208. “There is magic in this place, the owl seems to say. You just have to sit and breathe and wait and it will find you. He sits and breathes and waits and the Earth travels another thousand kilometers along its orbit. Lifelong knots deep inside the boy loosen.”

— Anthony Doerr

209. “But curses are not real. Earth is all magma and continental crust and ocean. Gravity and time. Isn’t it?”

— Anthony Doerr

210. “For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.”

— Anthony Doerr

211. “Every hour, Robert thinks, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new. They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like bread crumbs. The world is remade.”

— Anthony Doerr

212. “What is a seed if not the purest kind of memory, a link to every generation that has gone before it?”

— Anthony Doerr

213. “We return to the places we’re from; we trample faded corners and pencil in new lines. ‘You’ve grown up so fast,’ Robert’s mother tells him at breakfast, at dinner. ‘Look at you.” But she’s wrong, thinks Robert. You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.”

— Anthony Doerr

214. “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

215. “Into the stillness come the voices of his masters, echoing from one side of his head while memory speaks from the other. Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.”

— Anthony Doerr

216. “Some people are weak in some ways, sir. Others in other ways.”

— Anthony Doerr

217. “Maybe living was no more than getting swept over a riverbed and eventually out to sea, no choices to make, only the vast, formless ocean ahead, the frothing waves, the lightless tomb of its depths.”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

219. “Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We’d pass out every time we saw – actually saw – a flower. Imagine if we only got to see a cumulonimbus cloud or Cassiopeia or a snowfall once a century: there’d be pandemonium in the streets. People would lie by the thousands in the fields on their backs.”

— Anthony Doerr

220. “Warner laces his boots and sings the songs and marches the marches, acting less out of duty than out of a time worn desire to be dutiful.”

— Anthony Doerr

221. “We serve the Reich, Pfennig. It does not serve us.”

— Anthony Doerr

222. “A ghastly creeping terror rises from a place beyond thoughts. Some innermost trapdoor she must leap upon immediately and lean against with all her weight and padlock shut.”

— Anthony Doerr

223. “It seems to Werner that the space between whatever has happened already and whatever is to come hovers an invisible borderland, the known on one side and the unknown on the other. He thinks of the girl who may or may not be in the city behind him.”

— Anthony Doerr

224. “The despair doesn’t last. Marie-Laure is too young and her father is too patient. There are, he assures her, no such things as curses. There is luck, maybe, bad or good. A slight inclination of each day toward success or failure. But no curses.”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

226. “They want the working classes, laborers. Boys who aren’t stamped by” – Herr Siedler frowns – “middle-class garbage. The cinemas and so forth. They want industrious boys. Exceptional boys.” “Yes, sir.”

— Anthony Doerr

227. “Always at the end they sit side by side again and pound the cushions, and slowly the room rematerializes around them. “Ah,” he says, more quietly, his accent fading, the faintest touch of dread returning to his voice, “here we are. Home.”

— Anthony Doerr

228. “What light shines at night! He never knew. Light will blind him.”

— Anthony Doerr

229. “But that bird can fly to Africa and back. Powered by bugs and worms and desire.”

— Anthony Doerr

230. “I write reviews of science books for the Boston Globe, so I like to give science books.”

— Anthony Doerr

231. “All month the ice muttered and howled and whistled. The trees echoed back and forth among themselves. Taken collectively, the sound was of deep wounding, of winter inexorably taking the life out of things.”

— Anthony Doerr

232. “Here’s what I mean by the miracle of language. When you’re falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader’s heart and a writer’s, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death... And here’s the magic. You’re different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.”

— Anthony Doerr

233. “Memory is a house with ten thousand rooms; it is a village slated to be inundated.”

— Anthony Doerr

234. “An avalanche descends onto the city. A hurricane. Teacups drift off shelves. Paintings slip off nails. In another quarter second, the sirens are inaudible. Everything is inaudible. The roar becomes loud enough to separate membranes in the middle ear.”

— Anthony Doerr

235. “Werner wonders in the dead of night, isn’t life a kind of corruption? 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 commandant insists upon, why the Reich measures their noses, clocks their hair color.”

— Anthony Doerr

236. “They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.”

— Anthony Doerr

237. “Max looks up from his book and says, “Mutti, what goes around the world but stays in a corner?” “I don’t know, Max.” “A postage stamp.”

— Anthony Doerr

238. “A real diamond, his father used to say, is never entirely free of inclusions. A real diamond is never perfect.”

— Anthony Doerr

239. “He made such a faint presence. It was like being in the room with a feather.”

— Anthony Doerr

240. “She opens the door to her grandfather’s bedroom and stops. Below her, the man pauses again. Has he heard her? Is he climbing more quietly? Out in the world waits a multitude of sanctuaries – gardens full of bright green wind; kingdoms of hedges; deep pools of forest shade through which butterflies float thinking only of nectar. She can get to none of them.”

— Anthony Doerr

241. “All summer the smells of nettles and daisies and rainwater purl through the gardens.”

— Anthony Doerr

242. “I went to Europe three times, I read dozens and dozens of books, I studied thousands of photos. But I always supplemented that research with imagination; research might give you detail, but imagination supplies the direction in which to apply all that detail.”

— Anthony Doerr

243. “Frederick’s dreaminess, his otherness – it’s on him like a scent, and everyone can smell it.”

— Anthony Doerr

244. “In the dormitory window one night, Frederick rest his forehead against the glass. “I hate them. I hate them for that.”

— Anthony Doerr

245. “But have heart. Hope is something that can be very dangerous but without it life would be horribly dry. Impossible, even. Take it from me.”

— Anthony Doerr

246. “Maybe... a person can experience an illness as a kind of health. Maybe not every disease is a deficit, a taking away. Maybe what’s happening to her is an opening, a window, a migration.”

— Anthony Doerr

247. “He marveled at the indifference of the world, the way it kept on, despite everything.”

— Anthony Doerr

248. “I guess you could say I’ve been writing all my life.”

— Anthony Doerr

249. “The future waited for him to keep his appointment.”

— Anthony Doerr

250. “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