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

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“We...find it hard to conceive of...of a consciousness whose power, intellect and capacity can be both infinite and capable of caring," we replied. "We find it hard to accept that there is an unknown thing set above us, to judge us, that we cannot judge in return. Such a concept is, it would appear to us, injustice incarnate, not redemption at all.”
― Kate Griffin, quote from The Neon Court

“ما الزهرة التي تطير
من عصفور إلى عصفور؟”
― Pablo Neruda, quote from The Book of Questions

“I have really good eyesight,” I said, wondering if everyone who came in to see me today was going to be profoundly annoying.”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dexter By Design

“He imagined a town called A. Around the communal fire they’re shaping arrowheads and carving tributes o the god of the hunt. One day some guys with spears come over the ridge, perform all kinds of meanness, take over, and the new guys rename the town B. Whereupon they hang around the communal fire sharpening arrowheads and carving tributes to the god of the hunt. Some climatic tragedy occurs — not carving the correct tributary figurines probably — and the people of B move farther south, where word is there’s good fishing, at least according to those who wander to B just before being cooked for dinner. Another tribe of unlucky souls stops for the night in the emptied village, looks around at the natural defenses provided by the landscape, and decides to stay awhile. It’s a while lot better than their last digs — what with the lack of roving tigers and such — plus it comes with all the original fixtures. they call the place C, after their elder, who has learned that pretending to talk to spirits is a fun gag that gets you stuff. Time passes. More invasions, more recaptures, D, E, F, and G. H stands as it is for a while. That ridge provides some protection from the spring floods, and if you keep a sentry up there you can see the enemy coming for miles. Who wouldn’t want to park themselves in that real estate? The citizens of H leave behind cool totems eventually toppled by the people of I, whose lack of aesthetic sense if made up for by military acumen. J, K, L, adventures in thatched roofing, some guys with funny religions from the eastern plains, long-haired freaks from colder climes, the town is burned to the ground and rebuilt by still more fugitives. This is the march of history. And conquest and false hope. M falls to plague, N to natural disaster — same climatic tragedy as before, apparently it’s cyclical. Mineral wealth makes it happen for the O people, and the P people are renowned for their basket weaving. No one ever — ever — mentions Q. The dictator names the city after himself; his name starts with the letter R. When the socialists come to power they spend a lot of time painting over his face, which is everywhere. They don’t last. Nobody lasts because there’s always somebody else. They all thought they owned it because they named it and that was their undoing. They should have kept the place nameless. They should have been glad for their good fortune, and left it at that. X, Y, Z.”
― Colson Whitehead, quote from Apex Hides the Hurt

“We have all been expelled from the Garden, but the ones who suffer most in exile are those who are still permitted to dream of perfection.”
― Stanley Kunitz, quote from The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz

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