Top 500 Anthony Doerr Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “In the dormitory window one night, Frederick rest his forehead against the glass. “I hate them. I hate them for that.”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

255. “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

256. “You lose sleep, you lose your 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 guilty about that, that he went on living, eating tomato sandwiches, going to Iditarod Days with his father, making snowballs, when his mother could not.”

— Anthony Doerr

257. “I feel like it has gone very fast for me, but I feel like it wasn’t instantaneous, at all. I was getting a lot of rejections. I just got very lucky and it happened quickly for me. I don’t feel like I’m a prodigy or something.”

— Anthony Doerr

258. “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?”

— Anthony Doerr

259. “She takes no notice of him; she seems to know nothing but the morning.”

— Anthony Doerr

260. “To know her is to realize the thousand forms of inquiry.”

— Anthony Doerr

261. “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

262. “Sublimity,” Hauptmann says, panting, “you know what that is, Pfennig?” He is tipsy, animated, almost prattling. Never has Werner seen him like this. “It’s the instant when one thing is about to become something else. Day to night, caterpillar to butterfly. Fawn to doe. Experiment to result. Boy to man.”

— Anthony Doerr

263. “She finds the ribbon she uses as a bookmark, opens the book, and the museum falls away.”

— Anthony Doerr

264. “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

265. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

268. “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

269. “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

270. “Etienne,” Marie-Laure whispers, “are you ever sorry that we came here? That I got dropped in your lap and you and Madame Manec had to look after me? Did you ever feel like I brought a curse into your life?” “Marie-Laure,” he says without hesitation. He squeezes her hand with both of his. “You are the best thing that has ever come into my life.”

— Anthony Doerr

271. “Go,” says Volkheimer again. Werner looks at him a last time: his torn jacket and shovel jaw. The tenderness of his big hands. What you could be.”

— Anthony Doerr

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

276. “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

277. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

279. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

282. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

284. “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

285. “A good journal entry- like a good song, or sketch, or photograph- ought to break up the habitual and life away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought to be a love letter to the world.”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

287. “Travel definitely affects me as a writer.”

— Anthony Doerr

288. “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

289. “If your same blood doesn’t run in the arms and legs of the person you’re next to, you can’t trust anything.”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

295. “Different days pass verdict on different men, and only the last day a final verdict on all men, and consequently no day is to be trusted.”

— Anthony Doerr

296. “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

297. “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

298. “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

299. “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

300. “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