Quotes from All the Light We Cannot See

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

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

“Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from All the Light We Cannot See

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

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

“When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don't you do the same?”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from All the Light We Cannot See

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

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

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

“What do we call visible light? We call it color. But the electromagnetic spectrum runs to zero in one direction and infinity in the other, so really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from All the Light We Cannot See

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

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

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

“Your problem, Werner,” says Frederick, “is that you still believe you own your life.”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from 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, quote from All the Light We Cannot See

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

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

“That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much. Only the strongest people can turn away from feelings like that.”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from 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.”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from 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.”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from All the Light We Cannot See

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

“...the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from 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, quote from All the Light We Cannot See

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

Video

About the author

Popular quotes

“We startled some strange, long-necked shaggy creatures that had been grazing in the field, and I swear one of them spit at Feniul. Hagen slipped off of Leontes'neck and started to follow the creatures into the little copse of trees they had taken shelter in, fascinated, but I called him back.
"They spit."I said. "They probably bite as well."
"They are ill tempered things,"Amacarin agreed."But I saw someone riding one yesterday. It did not look like a smooth-gaited beast, though."
Now there was even more longing in Hagen's face."
Luka started laughing. "I shall buy you one when you finish your apprenticeship." He told my brother. "It can be your mastery gift. A hairy, spitting cow horse.”
― Jessica Day George, quote from Dragon Spear

“The Universe is picking us off one by one. Yesterday part of the poop deck went, and with it all the toilets.”
― Stanisław Lem, quote from The Star Diaries: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy

“I watched her backside as she went. I thought perhaps I wouldn't die if I could still find time to watch a well-crafted bottom”
― Mark Lawrence, quote from King of Thorns

“The scent of linden blossoms hung heavy on the air. Dortchen made a sharp, jerking movement, as if to walk away. But she hesitated, then turned and went down the long, winding path, past the tangle of briar roses and into the secret grove of linden trees. She picked a blossom and held it to her nose, inhaling deeply. Then she sat on the grass, the blossom cupped in her hand, leant her head back against the tree and closed her eyes. All she could hear was the soft sough of the wind in the leaves, and the humming of innumerable bees as they gathered the nectar from the creamy-white flowers.”
― Kate Forsyth, quote from The Wild Girl

“...las viejas fotografías engañan mucho, nos dan la ilusión de que estamos vivos en ellas, y no es cierto, la persona a quien estamos mirando ya no existe, y ella, si pudiese vernos, no se reconocería en nosotros.”
― José Saramago, quote from All the Names

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.