Top 500 Anthony Doerr Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “She finds the ribbon she uses as a bookmark, opens the book, and the museum falls away.”

— Anthony Doerr

252. “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

253. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

256. “But the cracks were splitting, finding power, thickening into chasms.”

— Anthony Doerr

257. “They just say words, and what are words but sounds these men shape out of breath, weightless vapors they send into the air of the kitchen to dissipate and die.”

— Anthony Doerr

258. “Werner sleeps in a tiny dormitory with seven other fourteen-year-olds. The bunk above belongs to Frederick: a reedy boy, thin as a blade of grass, skin as pale as cream. Frederick is new too. He’s from Berlin. His father is assistant to an ambassador. When Frederick speaks, his attention floats up, as though he’s scanning the sky for something.”

— Anthony Doerr

259. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

261. “Why, Esther wonders, do any of us believe our lives lead outward through time? How do we know we aren’t continually traveling inward, toward our centers? Because this is how it feels to Esther when she sits on her deck in Geneva, Ohio, in the last spring of her life; it feels as if she is being drawn down some path that leads deeper inside, toward a miniature, shrouded, final kingdom that has waited within her all along.”

— Anthony Doerr

262. “My sister-in-law is a painter, and I’ll say, how long did it take you to paint that painting. She’ll say, It took me maybe three days, but it took me all my life to get the skills to paint that painting.”

— Anthony Doerr

263. “His mind, while he works, is almost quiet, almost calm. This is an act of memory.”

— Anthony Doerr

264. “You have minds,” Bastian murmurs one evening in the refectory, each boy hunching almost imperceptibly farther over his food as the commandant’s finger grazes the back of his uniform. “But minds are not to be trusted. Minds are always drifting toward ambiguity, toward questions, when what you really need is certainty. Purpose. Clarity. Do not trust your minds.”

— Anthony Doerr

265. “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

266. “She was crying now, quietly, inhaling so vehemently it was as if she were trying to suck the tears back into her eyes.”

— Anthony Doerr

267. “When lightning strikes at sea, why don’t all the fish die?”

— Anthony Doerr

268. “Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitary.”

— Anthony Doerr

269. “I think about how Grandpa Z says the sky is blue because it’s dusty and octopuses can unscrew the tops off jars and starfish have eyes at the tips of their arms. I think: No matter what happens, no matter how wretched and gloomy everything can get, at least Mrs. Sabo got to feel this.”

— Anthony Doerr

270. “That’s how he feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing her hair: as though his love 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

271. “I always told my dad I’d play professional football.”

— Anthony Doerr

272. “The air between them seemed to accumulate energy.”

— Anthony Doerr

273. “He thinks: I only want to sit here with her for a thousand hours.”

— Anthony Doerr

274. “Does she grieve over his absence? Or has she calcified her feelings, protected herself, as he is learning to do?”

— Anthony Doerr

275. “From outside comes a light tinkling, fragments of glass, perhaps, falling into the streets. It sounds both beautiful and strange, as though gemstones were raining from the sky.”

— Anthony Doerr

276. “This was a life, this was how people chose to live? Somewhere inside she could feel winds dying, the gales of her youth stifled. She was learning that in her life everything – health, happiness, even love – was subject to the landscape; the weathers of the world were inseparable from the weathers of her soul.”

— Anthony Doerr

277. “Radio – and perhaps airplanes, and then of course, the atom bomb – was the preeminent technology of the first half of the 20th century. It was how the Third Reich controlled its citizens, spread lies, and disseminated fear.”

— Anthony Doerr

278. “The dead are gone and so their power over the living is only temporary. You lose sleep, you lose appetite, but eventually you fall asleep and eventually you eat – you may hate yourself for it, but the body’s demands are incontrovertible. He had always felt guilt about that, that he went on living... p 115.”

— Anthony Doerr

279. “Even the banana plantations, the big, hardy trees on the flanks of Mount St. Andrew, seemed to lilt and acquiesce in the heat.”

— Anthony Doerr

280. “Whoever says adults are better at paying attention than children is wrong: we’re too busying filtering out the world, focusing on some task or another, paying no attention. Our kids are the ones discovering new contents all day long.”

— Anthony Doerr

281. “We used to pick berries by the Ruhr. My sister and me.”

— Anthony Doerr

282. “How few days are left in the lives of anyone. How few hours.”

— Anthony Doerr

283. “Hadn’t the actors acted of their own volition?”

— Anthony Doerr

284. “You will become like a waterfall, a volley of bullets–you will all surge in the same direction at the same pace toward the same cause. You will forgo comforts; you will live by duty alone. You will eat country and breathe nation.”

— Anthony Doerr

285. “For lunches he rode the elevator to the fourth-floor food court and ate Thai Town or Subway at a table tucked among potted tropicals, gazing past milling teenagers to the little penny-choked fountain where a copper salmon spat water into a chlorinated pool.”

— Anthony Doerr

286. “The quiet is fretful, unnatural. It’s what a mouse must feel as it steps from its hole and into the open blades of a meadow, never knowing what shadow might come cruising above.”

— Anthony Doerr

287. “I’m scared, Papa.” “Keep hold of me.”

— Anthony Doerr

288. “I do fish. I think there is a connection between thinking and fishing mostly because you spend a lot of time up to your waist in water without a whole lot to keep your mind busy.”

— Anthony Doerr

289. “But he didn’t have language for what he really wanted to say; he couldn’t explain how her wildness that day, on the road, had thrilled him as much as it terrified him.”

— Anthony Doerr

290. “He wondered if such things were born into people. If perhaps we cannot alter who we are – if the place we come from dictates the place we will end up.”

— Anthony Doerr

291. “From somewhere comes the sound of fire: the sound of dried roses being crumbled in a fist.”

— Anthony Doerr

292. “The other boys crane their necks. Dr. Hauptmann’s lips are pink and his eyelids are improbably thin. As though he is watching Werner even when he blinks. He says, “Make them all.”

— Anthony Doerr

293. “Another hour, another day, another year. Lump of carbon no larger than a chestnut. Mantled with algae, bedecked with barnacles. Crawled over by snails. It stirs among the pebbles.”

— Anthony Doerr

294. “That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much. Only the strongest people can turn away from feelings like that.”

— Anthony Doerr

295. “His thoughts skirted Sandy and especially Grace as if they were fatal chasms into which he might tumble.”

— Anthony Doerr

296. “The dread that had been rising all morning rose higher in his throat as if by capillary action.”

— Anthony Doerr

297. “At Madame’s suggestion, they lie down in the weeds, and Marie-Laure listens to honeybees mine the flowers and tries to imagine their journeys as Etienne described them: each worker following a rivulet of odor, looking for ultraviolet patterns in the flowers, filling baskets on her hind legs with pollen grains, then navigating, drunk and heavy, all the way home. How.”

— Anthony Doerr

298. “To shut you eyes is to guess nothing of blindness.”

— Anthony Doerr

299. “He says, “I saved her only to hear her die.”

— Anthony Doerr

300. “But the huge bowl of the sky remains untracked: no zeppelins, no bombers, no superhuman paratroopers, just the last songbirds returning from their winter homes, and the quicksilver winds of spring transmuting into the heavier, greener breezes of summer.”

— Anthony Doerr