Anthony Doerr Quotes

“A line comes back to Marie-Laure from Jules Verne: Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.”

“Live faithfully, fight bravely, and die laughing.”

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

“Sometimes the eye of a hurricane is the safest place to be.”

“I am only alive because I have not yet died.”

“We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.”

“Doing nothing is as good as collaborating.”

“Every outcome has its cause, and every predicament has its solution.”

“A real diamond is never perfect.”

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

“You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.”

“Is she happy? For portions of every day, she is happy.”

“See obstacles as opportunities, Reinhold. See obstacles as inspirations.”

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

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

“Why else do any of this if not to become who we want to be?”

“All your life you wait, and then it finally comes, and are you ready?”

“Some people are weak in some ways, sir. Others in other ways.”

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

“We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.”

“It’s embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.”

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

“Some griefs can never be put right.”

“Every rumor carries a seed of truth,”

To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air.