Top 500 Anthony Doerr Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “I never played inside as a kid – even in the rain I’d go out.”

— Anthony Doerr

302. “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

303. “You ever hope for something so much? So much you can’t sleep, so much your skull hurts? But the thing is, you don’t even know if the thing you’re wishing for is possible? You don’t even know if it could happen? And it’s all out of your control?”

— Anthony Doerr

304. “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

305. “And doesn’t a writer do the same thing? Isn’t she knitting together scraps of dreams? She hunts down the most vivid details and links them in sequences that will let a reader see, smell, and hear a world that seems complete in itself; she builds a stage set and painstakingly hides all the struts and wires and nail holes, then stands back and hopes whoever might come to see it will believe.”

— Anthony Doerr

306. “I’ve been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff.”

— Anthony Doerr

307. “Dust floats through the feeble beam of the flashlight: ten thousand particles, turning softly, twinkling.”

— Anthony Doerr

308. “Prosperity depends on ferocity.”

— Anthony Doerr

309. “And this feeling, permeating every waking minute, that he had made too many wrong decisions.”

— Anthony Doerr

310. “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

311. “No,” she says. “I want to believe that Papa hasn’t been anywhere near it.”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

313. “Memory builds itself without any clean or objective logic: a dot here, another dot here, and plenty of dark spaces in between. What we know is always evolving, always subdividing. Remember a memory often enough and you can create a new memory, the memory of remembering.”

— Anthony Doerr

314. “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

315. “Silence is the fruit of occupation.”

— Anthony Doerr

316. “Maybe he was dead and this island was purgatory from which he could only watch the souls of the more deserving go shuttling past to their various Edens. What is death, after all, but a cessation of involvement with the world, a departure from those you love, and those who love you?”

— Anthony Doerr

317. “But on most days, especially the warm ones, life exhausts him; the worsening traffic and graffiti and company politics, everyone grousing about bonuses, benefits, overtime. Sometimes in the slow heat of summer, long before dawn, Volkheimer paces in the harsh dazzle of the billboard light and feels his loneliness on him like a disease.”

— Anthony Doerr

318. “She has had two lovers. The first was a visiting scientist who never returned, and the second was a Canadian named John who scattered things – ties, coins, socks, breath mints – around any room he entered.”

— Anthony Doerr

319. “Short stories are wonderful and extremely challenging, and the joy of them, because it only takes me three or four months to write, I can take more risks with them. It’s just less of your life invested.”

— Anthony Doerr

320. “Yet they spoke now across a glass-topped dining table as if words were just words, as if their histories were equivalent.”

— Anthony Doerr

321. “Over time his images of the baby, like photographs handled too often, had worn down and creased, lost their definition.”

— Anthony Doerr

322. “There was a man who used that transmitter you have. Who broadcast lessons about science. When I was a boy. I used to listen to them with my sister.” “That was the voice of my grandfather. You heard him?” “Many times. We loved them.” The window glows. The slow sandy light of dawn permeates the room. Everything transient and aching; everything tentative. To be here, in this room, high in this house, out of the cellar, with her: it is like medicine.”

— Anthony Doerr

323. “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

324. “Our shadows are our histories. We drag them everywhere.”

— Anthony Doerr

325. “In a corner of the city, inside a tall, narrow house at Number 4 rue Vauborel, on the sixth and highest floor, a sightless sixteen-year-old named Marie-Laure LeBlanc kneels over a low table covered entirely with a model.”

— Anthony Doerr

326. “I found my first novel difficult. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s any more difficult than driving a cab or going to any other job, but there are so many opportunities for self-doubt, that you just kind of need to soldier on.”

— Anthony Doerr

327. “So many human beings, none of them seeing clearly.”

— Anthony Doerr

328. “These were the beginnings of a new existence; Winkler could feel it gestating.”

— Anthony Doerr

329. “Where,” he asks, “is that book? The one with the birds? In the gold slipcover?”

— Anthony Doerr

330. “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

331. “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

332. “He thought he might say more, but something in her face had closed off, and the opportunity passed.”

— Anthony Doerr

333. “Clair de Lune,” a song that makes her think of leaves fluttering, and of the hard ribbons of sand beneath her feet at low tide.”

— Anthony Doerr

334. “He was failing at everything important. A room away his daughter was sitting with her face in her hands and he could not go to her.”

— Anthony Doerr

335. “If only she had brought her novel down with her.”

— Anthony Doerr

336. “Is it dawn? She climbs the ladder and presses her ear to the trapdoor. No more sirens. Maybe the house burned.”

— Anthony Doerr

337. “What we eat is a poem.”

— Anthony Doerr

338. “The bookseller said it’s in two parts, and this is the first. I thought that next year, if we keep saving, we can get the second –.”

— Anthony Doerr

339. “The urge to know scrapes against the inability to know.”

— Anthony Doerr

340. “The fires pool and strut; they flow up the sides of the ramparts like tides; they splash into alleys, over rooftops, through a carpark. Smoke chases dust; ash chases smoke. A newsstand floats, burning.”

— Anthony Doerr

341. “The whole thing feels like a pool of water that I’m trying to hold in my hands.”

— Anthony Doerr

342. “Look closely and the picturesque inevitably cracks apart and becomes more interesting.”

— Anthony Doerr

343. “They would not get closer to the truth that night. They watched a period of hockey in silence. Winkler insisted on doing the dishes. Herman insisted on driving him to the bus stop.”

— Anthony Doerr

344. “It was love. He excavated a boot print she’d left on the snowy step outside his apartment and preserved it in his freezer.”

— Anthony Doerr

345. “The stars were so many and so white they looked like chips of ice, hammered through the fabric of the sky.”

— Anthony Doerr

346. “Did dreams, he wondered, when they arrived, make a sound? The smallest kind, like the noise of an embryo being conceived, or a snowflake touching down?”

— Anthony Doerr

347. “WWII is something contemporary readers already know a lot about. If our schools are doing their jobs, they know about the invasion of Normandy, the Hitler Youth, the Holocaust, and at least a few of the horrors of the Eastern Front.”

— Anthony Doerr

348. “The sky a pit of violet, edged with black.”

— Anthony Doerr

349. “Nostos, yes. The act of homecoming, a safe arrival. Of course, mapping a single English word onto a Greek one is almost always slippery. A nostos also means a song about a homecoming.”

— Anthony Doerr

350. “We return to the places we’re from; we trample faded corners and pencil in new lines.”

— Anthony Doerr