Shrastra > Shrastra's Quotes

“Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don't you do the same?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Don’t you want to be alive before you die?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“I have been feeling very clearheaded lately and what I want to write about today is the sea. It contains so many colors. Silver at dawn, green at noon, dark blue in the evening. Sometimes it looks almost red. Or it will turn the color of old coins. Right now the shadows of clouds are dragging across it, and patches of sunlight are touching down everywhere. White strings of gulls drag over it like beads.

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, All the Light We Cannot See

“All your life you wait, and then it finally comes, and are you ready?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“How do you ever know for certain that you are doing the right thing?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“A real diamond is never perfect.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Some people are weak in some ways, sir. Others in other ways.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“His voice is low and soft, a piece of silk you might keep in a drawer and pull out only on rare occasions, just to feel it between your fingers.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“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.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Stones are just stones and rain is just rain and misfortune is just bad luck.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“She walks like a ballerina in dance slippers, her feet as articulate as hands, a little vessel of grace moving out into the fog.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“What the war did to dreamers.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“The way her fingers flutter through the space around her. Each a thing he hopes never to forget.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“To men like that, time was a surfeit, a barrel they watched slowly drain. When really, he thinks, it’s a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Is it right,” Jutta says, “to do something only because everyone else is doing it?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“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.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Sometimes the eye of a hurricane is the safest place to be.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Doing nothing is as good as collaborating.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Do you know what happens, Etienne,” says Madame Manec from the other side of the kitchen, “when you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water?” “You will tell us, I am sure.” “It jumps out. But do you know what happens when you put the frog in a pot of cool water and then slowly bring it to a boil? You know what happens then?” Marie-Laure waits. The potatoes steam. Madame Manec says, “The frog cooks.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“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, All the Light We Cannot See

“Memories cartwheel out of her head & tumble across the floor.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“There is pride, too, though—pride that he has done it alone. That his daughter is so curious, so resilient. There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing. That’s how it feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing her hair: as though his love for his daughter will outstrip the limits of his body. The walls could fall away, even the whole city, and the brightness of that feeling would not wane. The drain moans; the cluttered house crowds in close.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“A shell screams over the house. He thinks: I only want to sit here with her for a thousand hours.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“Why else do any of this if not to become who we want to be?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“It was hard to live through the early 1940s in France and not have the war be the center from which the rest of your life spiraled. Marie-Laure still cannot wear shoes that are too large, or smell a boiled turnip, without experiencing revulsion. Neither can she listen to lists of names. Soccer team rosters, citations at the end of journals, introductions at faculty meetings – always they seem to her some vestige of the prison lists that never contained her father’s name.”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See