Anthony Doerr Quotes

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor-it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience--buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello--become new all over again.

A real diamond is never perfect.

For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.

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.

Things hardly ever work on the first try. We'll make another, a better one.

It wasn't until I was 26 or 25 when I started sending work out to magazines.

I write reviews of science books for the Boston Globe, so I like to give science books.

I guess you could say I've been writing all my life.

Don’t you want to be alive before you die?

Only Numbers. Pure math. You have to accustom yourself to thinking that way.

I never played inside as a kid - even in the rain I'd go out.

Travel definitely affects me as a writer.

I always told my dad I'd play professional football.

You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't.

I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff.

In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.

You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.

War is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity: chocolate or bullets or parachute silk.

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.

What the war did to the dreamers.

They can march for days without eating. They impregnate every schoolgirl they meet.

What the war did to dreamers.

This, she realizes, is the basis of all fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark.

I am only alive because I have not yet died.

---on her best days, she glimpses the limitless span of millennia behind her: millions of years, tens of millions.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.

Rome is a broken mirror, the falling straps of a dress, a puzzle of astonishing complexity. It is an iceberg floating below our terrace, all its ballasts hidden beneath the surface.

That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much. Only the strongest people can turn away from feelings like that.

The very life of any creature is a quick-fading spark in fathomless darkness.

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

The universe is full of fuel.

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

I’m thankful that everything sweet is sweet because it is finite.

On the rue de la Crosse, the Hotel of Bees becomes almost weightless for a moment, lifted in a spiral of flame, before it begins to rain the pieces back to the earth

Don't you ever get tired of believing, Madame? Don't you ever want proof?

How about peaches, dear?” murmurs Madame Manec, and Marie-Laure can hear a can opening, juice slopping into a bowl. Seconds later, she’s eating wedges of wet sunlight.

Silence is the fruit of occupation.

There are, he assures her, no such things as curses. There is luck, maybe, bad or good. A slight inclination of each day towards success or failure. But no curses.

There are, he assures her, no such things as curses. There is luck, maybe, bad or good. A slight indication of each day toward success or failure. But no curses.

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.

You must never stop believing. That’s the most important thing.

You know the greatest lesson of history? It's that history is whatever the victors say it is...Whoever wins, that's who decides the history.