Top 500 Anthony Doerr Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

303. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

305. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

312. “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

313. “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

314. “Silence is the fruit of occupation.”

— Anthony Doerr

315. “I never played inside as a kid – even in the rain I’d go out.”

— Anthony Doerr

316. “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

317. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

319. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

321. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

324. “Prosperity depends on ferocity.”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

326. “I guess whatever maturity is there may be there because I’ve been keeping a journal forever. In high school my friends would make fun of me – you’re doing your man diary again. So I was always trying to translate experience into words.”

— Anthony Doerr

327. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

331. “Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio K.”

— Anthony Doerr

332. “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

333. “There are comforts in knowing the boundaries of the place you live. Everyone here seems to behave like things are endless.”

— Anthony Doerr

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

338. “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

339. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

341. “We are all just tenants here. Even the one thing we believe is ours – the time we’re given on earth – does that belong to us?”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

343. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

346. “What we eat is a poem.”

— Anthony Doerr

347. “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

348. “There are moments when von Rumpel feels impatience rising in him like bile, but he forces himself to swallow it back. It will come.”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

350. “Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.”

— Anthony Doerr