“War is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity: chocolate or bullets or parachute silk.”
― All the Light We Cannot See
― All the Light We Cannot See
“What mazes there are in this world. The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father recreated in his models... None more complicated than the human brain, Etienne would say, what may be the most complex object in existence; one wet kilogram within which spin universes.”
― All the Light We Cannot See
― All the Light We Cannot See
“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. Marie-Laure can sit in an attic high above the street and hear lilies rustling in marshes two miles away. She hears Americans scurry across farm fields, directing their huge cannons at the smoke of Saint-Malo; she hears families sniffling around hurricane lamps in cellars, crows hopping from pile to pile, flies landing on corpses in ditches; she hears the tamarinds shiver and the jays shriek and the dune grass burn; she feels the great granite fist, sunk deep into the earth’s crust, on which Saint-Malo sits, and the ocean teething at it from all four sides, and the outer islands holding steady against the swirling tides; she hears cows drink from stone troughs and dolphins rise through the green water of the Channel; she hears the bones of dead whales stir five leagues below, their marrow offering a century of food for cities of creatures who will live their whole lives and never once see a photon sent from the sun. She hears her snails in the grotto drag their bodies over the rocks.”
― All the Light We Cannot See
― 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?”
― All the Light We Cannot See
― All the Light We Cannot See
“Open your eyes, the Frenchman on the radio used to say, and see what you can with them before they close forever.”
― All the Light We Cannot See
― All the Light We Cannot See
Mollie’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Mollie’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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