Spencer

“Of all the mad things we humans do, Rex once told him, there might be nothing more humbling, or more noble, than trying to translate the dead languages. We don’t know how the old Greeks sounded when they spoke; we can scarcely map their words onto ours; from the very start, we’re doomed to fail. But in the attempt, Rex said, in trying to drag something across the river from the murk of history into our time, into our language: that was, he said, the best kind of fool’s errand. Zeno sharpens his pencil and tries again.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“Each sign signifies a sound, and to link sounds is to form words, and to link words is to construct worlds.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“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, Cloud Cuckoo Land

“he realizes that the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.”
― Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land