Top 500 Anthony Doerr Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.”

— Anthony Doerr

402. “Don’t you ever get tired of believing, Madame? Don’t you ever want proof?” Madame Manec rests a hand on Marie-Laure’s forehead. The thick hand that first reminded her of a gardener’s or a geologist’s. “You must never stop believing. That’s the most important thing.”

— Anthony Doerr

403. “Then the women start up again, scheming, and gabbling. Madame Manec brushes Marie-Laure’s hair in long absentminded strokes. “Seventy-six years old,” she whispers, “and I can still feel like this? Like a little girl with stars in her eyes?”

— Anthony Doerr

404. “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

405. “That first peach slithers down his throat like rapture. A sunrise in his mouth.”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

407. “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

408. “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

409. “Seconds later, she’s eating wedges of wet sunlight.”

— Anthony Doerr

410. “There has always been a sliver of panic in him, deeply buried, when it comes to his daughter: a fear that he is no good as a father, that he is doing everything wrong. That he never quite understood the rules.”

— Anthony Doerr

411. “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

412. “Isn’t doing nothing a kind of troublemaking?” “Doing nothing is doing nothing.” “Doing nothing is as good as collaborating.”

— Anthony Doerr

413. “By then Mkondo had become more than a game; it was the one way she could be certain she was alive.”

— Anthony Doerr

414. “Disgrace is not to fall but to lie.”

— Anthony Doerr

415. “It feels appropriate somehow, to have reached the edge of the continent, to have only the hammered sea left in front of him. As though this is the end point Werner has been moving toward ever since he left Zollverein.”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

417. “And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That great shuttles of souls might fly about faded but audible if you listen closely enough?”

— Anthony Doerr

418. “It strikes Werner just then as wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing indifference of the world – what pretensions humans have!”

— Anthony Doerr

419. “Werner looks at the blue of the walls and thinks of Birds of America, yellow-crowned heron, Kentucky warbler, scarlet tanager, bird after glorious bird, and Frederick’s gaze remains stuck in some terrible middle ground, each eye a stagnant pool into which Werner cannot bear to look. Relapse In late June 1942, for the first time since her fever, Madame Manec is not in the kitchen when Marie-Laure wakes.”

— Anthony Doerr

420. “Each sign signifies a sound, and to link sounds is to form words, and to link words is to construct worlds.”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

422. “There was joy in that moment – triumph. But an unexpected fear mixed with it; the stone looked like something enchanted, not meant for human eyes. An object that, once looked at, could never be forgotten.”

— Anthony Doerr

423. “But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same?”

— Anthony Doerr

424. “He had a love affair with photosynthesis. He could talk about moss for an hour. He said that plants carried wisdom humans would never be around long enough to understand.”

— Anthony Doerr

425. “Stranger, whoever you are, open this to learn what will amaze you.”

— Anthony Doerr

426. “You said that what’s so beautiful about a fool is that a fool never knows when to give up.”

— Anthony Doerr

427. “A second technician gauges Werner’s eye color against a chromatic scale on which sixty or so shades of blue are displayed. Werner’s color is himmelblau, sky blue. To assess his hair color, the man snips a lock of hair from Werner’s head and compares it to thirty or so other locks clipped to a board, arrayed darkest to lightest. “Schnee,” the man mutters, and makes a notation. Snow. Werner’s hair is lighter than the lightest color on the board.”

— Anthony Doerr

428. “Did time move forward, through people, or did people move through it, like clouds across the sky?”

— Anthony Doerr

429. “Repository,” he finally says, “you know this word? A resting place. A text – a book – is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.”

— Anthony Doerr

430. “I am quite gifted at waiting,” von Rumpel says in French. “It is my one great skill. I was never much good at athletics or mathematics, but even as a boy, I possessed unnatural patience. I would wait with my mother while she got her hair styled. I would sit in the chair and wait for hours, no magazine, no toys, not even swinging my legs back and forth. All the mothers were very impressed.”

— Anthony Doerr

431. “Where did the boy fit? He made such a faint presence. It was like being in a room with a feather. But his soul glowed with some fundamental kindness, didn’t it?”

— Anthony Doerr

432. “Water droplets shine in his eyelashes. Dusk seeps down through the overcast and a slight chill drops into the air and one by one families leave to walk or bike or ride the bus home.”

— Anthony Doerr

433. “Why is it so hard to transcend the identities assigned to us when we were young?”

— Anthony Doerr

434. “Opera houses! Cities on the moon! Ridiculous. They would all do better to put their faces on the curbs and wait for the boys who come through the city dragging sledges stacked with corpses.”

— Anthony Doerr

435. “What it would be like to spend ten years in this tall narrow house, shuttered from the world, studying its secrets and reading its volumes and looking at this girl.”

— Anthony Doerr

436. “One section of the old city, tucked against the western walls, becomes a firestorm in which the spires of flames, at their highest, reach three hundred feet. The appetite for oxygen is such that objects heavier than housecats are dragged into the flames.”

— Anthony Doerr

437. “Between 365 million and one billion birds die just from crashing into windows in the United States each year.”

— Anthony Doerr

438. “Stones are just stone an rain is just rain and misfortune is just bad luck. Some things are simply more rare than others, and that’s why there are locks.”

— Anthony Doerr

439. “Life: it’s happening beyond the mills, beyond the gates. Out there people chase questions of great importance.”

— Anthony Doerr

440. “The girl climbs into the swing and pendulums back and forth, pumping her legs, and watching her opens some valve in Werner’s soul. This is life, he thinks, this is why we live, to play like this on a day when winter is finally releasing its grip.”

— Anthony Doerr

441. “Her arms are wrapped around her head and her wool blanket is twisted around her midsection and her pillow is jammed into the crack between mattress and wall – even in sleep, a tableau of friction.”

— Anthony Doerr

442. “She can hear the bombers when they are three miles away. A mounting static. The hum inside a seashell.”

— Anthony Doerr

443. “All of it is burning. Every memory he ever made.”

— Anthony Doerr

444. “The sea is only a receptacle for all the prodigious, supernatural things that exist inside it. It is only movement and love; it is the living infinite.”

— Anthony Doerr

445. “But the moonlight stays unmoved by the wind, passing through clouds, through air, in what seems to Werner like impossibly slow, imperturbable rays. They hang across the buckling grass. Why doesn’t the wind move the light?”

— Anthony Doerr

446. “She has no memories of her mother but imagines her as white, a soundless brilliance.”

— Anthony Doerr

447. “He scans the field. Trees, sky, hay. Darkness falling like velvet. Already a few pale stars. Marie-Laure breathes the measured breath of sleep. Everyone should behave as if he carries the real thing. The locksmith reties the stone inside the bag and slips it back into his rucksack. He can feel its tiny weight there, as though he has slipped it inside his own mind: a knot.”

— Anthony Doerr

448. “It’s as if the city has become a library of books in an unknown language, the houses great shelves of illegible volumes, the lamps all extinguished.”

— Anthony Doerr

449. “Movies make you think civilization will end fast, like with aliens and explosions, but really it’ll end slow. Ours is already ending, it’s just ending too slow for people to notice.”

— Anthony Doerr

450. “December sucks the light from the castle. The sun hardly clears the horizon before sinking away. Snow falls once, twice, then stays locked over the lawns.”

— Anthony Doerr