Top 500 Anthony Doerr Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “Posters go up in the market, on tree trunks in the Place Chateaubriand. Voluntary surrender of firearms. Anyone who does not cooperate will be shot.”

— Anthony Doerr

352. “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

353. “It wasn’t until I was 26 or 25 when I started sending work out to magazines.”

— Anthony Doerr

354. “How much easier it would have been if he and Sandy could have fought: a skirmish in the night, some harsh words, some measure of the truth actually spoken aloud.”

— Anthony Doerr

355. “How can one country make another change its clocks? What if everybody refuses?” “Then a lot of people will be early. Or late.”

— Anthony Doerr

356. “Bernd molders in the corner. Jutta moves through the world somewhere, watching shadows disentangle themselves from night, watching minders limp past in the dawnn. It was enough when Werner was a boy, wasn’t it? A world of wildflowers blooming up through the shapes of rusty cast-off parts. A world of berries and carrot peels ad Frau Elena’s fairy tales. Of the sharp smell of tar, and trains passing, and a voice on the radio offering a loom on which to spin his dreams.”

— Anthony Doerr

357. “He wants to tell her what he has learned about the miracles of light, the way a day’s light fluxes in tides: pale and gleaming at dawn, the glare of noon, the gold of evening, the promise of twilight – every second of every day has its own magic. He wants to tell her that when things vanish they become something else, in death we rise again in the blades of grass, the splitting bodies of seeds.”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

359. “Radio: it ties a million ears to a single mouth. Out of loudspeakers all around Zollverein, the staccato voice of the Reich grows like some imperturbable tree; its subjects lean toward its branches as if towards the lips of God. And when God stops whispering, they become desperate for someone who can put things right.”

— Anthony Doerr

360. “You don’t say, I’m going to be a writer when I grow up – at least I didn’t.”

— Anthony Doerr

361. “Gates were creaking open inside him – paths, long sealed off, revealed themselves once more.”

— Anthony Doerr

362. “Nothing that could fit on this page, or a hundred of these pages, would possibly accommodate all the things I should say to you, all the things you deserve to hear.”

— Anthony Doerr

363. “The year swung past the fulcrum of another equinox.”

— Anthony Doerr

364. “All the events of his life were compressing to singularity: one night, one hour.”

— Anthony Doerr

365. “To be a parent and take an occasional day off from being a parent is a special kind of joy – a lightening, a sweetness made sweeter by its impermanence.”

— Anthony Doerr

366. “Fifteen and a half years as incontestable, a continent he’d never visit, a staircase he’d never climb.”

— Anthony Doerr

367. “What mazes there are in this world.”

— Anthony Doerr

368. “Ignorance was, in the end, and in so many ways, a privilege: to find a shell, to feel it, to understand only on some unspeakable level why it bothered to be so lovely. What joy he found in that, what utter mystery.”

— Anthony Doerr

369. “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

370. “You think that’s going to exonerate you?”

— Anthony Doerr

371. “He would be relegated to a post best left fastened and buried.”

— Anthony Doerr

372. “It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.”

— Anthony Doerr

373. “Her great-uncle seems kind, curious, and entirely sane. Stillness: this is what he radiates more than anything else. The stillness of a tree. Of a mouse blinking in the dark.”

— Anthony Doerr

374. “He could not look at his daughter without feeling his heart turn over.”

— Anthony Doerr

375. “Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world. We rise again in the gross. In the flowers. In songs.”

— Anthony Doerr

376. “We are Malouins first, say the people of Saint-Malo.”

— Anthony Doerr

377. “Behind her leg a shy little girl – Grace – smiling up. “Dad?” It was a kind hope. But his dreams spoke to none of that: when he slept he dreamt of darkness, or of people he did not recognize, or of water closing slowly, almost gratefully, over his head.”

— Anthony Doerr

378. “Imogene has twenty-two birdfeeders, some pole-mounted, some suspended from eaves, platform feeders and globe feeders, coffee can feeders and feeders that look like little Swiss chalets, and every evening, when she comes home from work, she drags a stepladder from one to the next, toting a bucket of mixed seeds, keeping them full. In.”

— Anthony Doerr

379. “Maybe the idea was that he could write so many letters, deliver so many envelopes back to Sandy, eventually he’d have sent all of himself, and could exist more there than he did here.”

— Anthony Doerr

380. “A fourth door, and a fifth, on and on until you reach a thirteenth, a little locked door no bigger than a shoe.” The children lean forward. “And then?” “Behind the thirteenth door” – the guide flourishes one of his impossibly wrinkled hands – “is the Sea of Flames.” Puzzlement. Fidgeting. “Come now. You’ve never heard of the Sea of Flames?”

— Anthony Doerr

381. “A warrior, truly engaged, does not experience guilt, fear, or remorse. A warrior, truly engaged, becomes something more than human.”

— Anthony Doerr

382. “Knock him on the head with the umbrella stand? Jab him with the paring knife? Scream. Die. Papa.”

— Anthony Doerr

383. “Good with tools,” Herr Siedler is saying. “Smart beyond your years. There are places for a boy like you. General Heissmeyer’s schools. Best of the best. Teach the mechanical sciences too. Code breaking, rocket propulsion, all the latest.”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

385. “Did you know,” says Marie-Laure, “that the chance of being hit by lightning is one in one million? Dr. Geffard taught me that.” “In one year or in one lifetime?” “I’m not sure.” “You should have asked.”

— Anthony Doerr

386. “We live in exciting times, says the radio. We make no complaints. We will plant our feet firmly in our earth, and no attack will move us.”

— Anthony Doerr

387. “Good evening, he thinks. Or heil Hitler. Everyone is choosing the latter.”

— Anthony Doerr

388. “To the bombardiers, the walled city on its granite headland, drawing ever closer, looks like an unholy tooth, something black and dangerous, a final abscess to be lanced away.”

— Anthony Doerr

389. “What you already have is better than what you so desperately seek.”

— Anthony Doerr

390. “Frau Elena paces the parlor, her slippers whispering left, whispering right. Coal cars grind past in the wet dark. Machinery hums in the distance: pistons throbbing, belts turning. Smoothly. Madly.”

— Anthony Doerr

391. “But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.”

— Anthony Doerr

392. “For Werner, doubts turn up regularly. Racial purity, political purity – Bastian speaks to a horror of any sort of corruption, and yet, 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.”

— Anthony Doerr

393. “The war drops its question mark. Memos are distributed. The collections must be protected. A small cadre of couriers has begun moving things to country estates. Locks and keys are in greater demand than ever.”

— Anthony Doerr

394. “Somewhere in these streets, plastic was invented. X-rays were discovered, continental drift was identified. What marvels does science cultivate here now?”

— Anthony Doerr

395. “Even the heart, which in higher animals, when agitated, pulsates with increased energy, in the snail under similar excitement, throbs with a slower motion.”

— Anthony Doerr

396. “Werner turns the fine-tune dial fractionally, and abruptly the voice booms into his ears, Dvee-nat-set, shayst-nat-set, davt-set-adeen, nonsense, terrible nonsense, pipelined directly into his head; it’s like reaching into a sack full of cotton and finding a razor blade inside, everything constant and undeviating and then that one dangerous thing, so sharp you can hardly feel it open your skin.”

— Anthony Doerr

397. “As if, inside Werner’s head, an infinitesimal orchestra has stirred to life.”

— Anthony Doerr

398. “A spring night is a power that sweeps through the crowded sheaves of blooming tulips and pours into your heart like a river.”

— Anthony Doerr

399. “We are a volley of bullets, we are cannonballs. We are the tip of the sword.”

— Anthony Doerr

400. “When the wind is blowing, which it almost always is, with the walls groaning and the shutters banging, the rooms overloaded and the staircase wound tightly up through its center, the house seems the material equivalent of her uncle’s inner being: apprehensive, isolated, but full of cobwebby wonders.”

— Anthony Doerr