Top 500 Anthony Doerr Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

204. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

206. “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

207. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

219. “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

220. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

222. “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

223. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

225. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

230. “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

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

237. “What use are memories when memories can do little more than fade?”

— Anthony Doerr

238. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

241. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

243. “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

244. “Four years of occupation, and the roar of oncoming bombers is the roar of what? Deliverance? Extirpation? The clack-clack of small-arms fire. The gravelly snare drums of flak. A dozen pigeons roosting on the cathedral spire cataract down its length and wheel out over the sea.”

— Anthony Doerr

245. “Whenever he can, Werner records what the partisans say on magnetic tape. Everybody, he is learning, likes to hear themselves talk. Hubris, like the oldest stories. They raise the antenna too high, broadcast for too many minutes, assume the world offers safety and rationality when of course it does not.”

— Anthony Doerr

246. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

248. “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

249. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr