Top 500 Anthony Doerr Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “A warrior, truly engaged, does not experience guilt, fear, or remorse. A warrior, truly engaged, becomes something more than human.”

— Anthony Doerr

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

356. “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

357. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

364. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

366. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

368. “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

369. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

371. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

379. “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

380. “Hope is the pillar that holds up the world.”

— Anthony Doerr

381. “October is here, and bright cold winds ought to pour off the ocean; leaves ought to tumble down the alleys. But the wind has come and gone. As if deciding it did not like the changes here.”

— Anthony Doerr

382. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

386. “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

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

390. “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

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

394. “Grandfather said that the ocean was large enough to contain every dream everyone had ever dreamed, but until now he had no comprehension of what that meant.”

— Anthony Doerr

395. “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

396. “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

397. “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

398. “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

399. “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

400. “To be in love was to be dazed twenty times a morning: by the latticework of frost on his windshield; by a feather loosed from his pillow; by a soft, pink rim of light over the hills. He slept three or four hours a night. Some days he felt as if he were about to peel back the surface of the Earth – the trees standing frozen on the hills, the churning face of the inlet – and finally witness what lay beneath, the structure under there, the fundamental grid.”

— Anthony Doerr