“To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from Memory Wall
“Every hour, Robert thinks, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new. They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like bread crumbs. The world is remade.”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from Memory Wall
“Don't tell me how to grieve. Don't tell me ghosts fade away eventually, like they do in movies, waving goodbye with see-through hands. Lots of things fade away but ghosts like these don't, heartbreak like these doesn't.”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from Memory Wall
“Draw the darkness ... and it will point out the light which has been in the paper all the while. Inside this world is folded another." from "Afterworld.”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from Memory Wall
“Why, Esther wonders, do any of us believe our lives lead outward through time? How do we know we aren't continually traveling inward, toward our centers? Because this is how it feels to Esther when she sits on her deck in Geneva, Ohio, in the last spring of her life; it feels as if she is being drawn down some path that leads deeper inside, toward a miniature, shrouded, final kingdom that has waited within her all along.”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from Memory Wall
“I used to think...that I had to be careful with how much I lived. As if life was a pocketful of coins. You only got so much and you didn't want to spend it all in one place...But now I know that life is the one thing in the world that never runs out. I might run out of mine, and you might run out of yours, but the world will never run out of life. And we're all very lucky to be part of something like that.”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from Memory Wall
“The urge to know scrapes against the inability to know.”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from Memory Wall
“Memory is a house with ten thousand rooms; it is a village slated to be inundated." from "Village 113”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from Memory Wall
“Memory builds itself without any clean or objective logic: a dot here, another dot here, and plenty of dark spaces in between. What we know is always evolving, always subdividing. Remember a memory often enough and you can create a new memory, the memory of remembering.”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from Memory Wall
“We return to the places we're from; we trample faded corners and pencil in new lines. 'You've grown up so fast,' Robert's mother tells him at breakfast, at dinner. 'Look at you." But she's wrong, thinks Robert. You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from Memory Wall
“It is the rarest thing...that gets preserved, that does not get erased, broken down, transformed.”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from Memory Wall
“First we die, the woman says. "Then our bodies are buried. So we die two deaths." "Then in another world, folded inside the living world, we wait. We wait until everyone who knew us when we were children has died. And then the last of them dies, we finally die our third death.”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from Memory Wall
“Don’t tell me how to grieve. Don’t tell me ghosts fade away eventually, like they do in movies, waving goodbye with see-through hands. Lots of things fade away but ghosts like these don’t, heartbreak like this doesn’t. The axe blade is still as sharp and real inside me as it was six months ago. I”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from Memory Wall
“This is not real suffering, she tells herself. this is only a matter of reprogramming her picture of the future. Of understanding that the line of descendancy is not continuous but arbitrary.”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from Memory Wall
“Twenty thousand days and nights in one place, each layered and trapped and folded on top of the last, the creases in her hands, the aches between her vertebrae. Embryo, seed coat, endosperm: What is a seed if not the purest kind of memory, a link to every generation that has gone before it?”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from Memory Wall
“Maybe...a person can experience an illness as a kind of health. Maybe not every disease is a deficit, a taking away. Maybe what's happening to her is an opening, a window, a migration.”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from Memory Wall
“I think about how Grandpa Z says the sky is blue because it's dusty and octopuses can unscrew the tops off jars and starfish have eyes at the tips of their arms. I think: No matter what happens, no matter how wretched and gloomy everything can get, at least Mrs. Sabo got to feel this.”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from Memory Wall
“We return to the places we're from; we trample faded corners and pencil in new lines.”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from Memory Wall
“Imogene has twenty-two birdfeeders, some pole-mounted, some suspended from eaves, platform feeders and globe feeders, coffee can feeders and feeders that look like little Swiss chalets, and every evening, when she comes home from work, she drags a stepladder from one to the next, toting a bucket of mixed seeds, keeping them full. In”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from Memory Wall
“What is a seed if not the purest kind of memory, a link to every generation that has gone before it?”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from Memory Wall
“Where do memories go once we’ve lost our ability to summon them? It”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from Memory Wall
“Memory is a house with ten thousand rooms; it is a village slated to be inundated.”
― Anthony Doerr, quote from Memory Wall
Anthony Doerr
Born place: in Cleveland, Ohio, The United States
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“Her voice, he thought, was like water running over pebbles in sunshine.”
― Katherine Rundell, quote from The Girl Savage
“Why did everyone else seem fine but I felt as if I were living in a cage I'd outgrown two shoe sizes ago?”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Dangerous
“This kiss will consummate a part of myself with him that is newly revealed - the living and breathing substance pulsating between both of us.”
― Renee Ericson, quote from More Than Water
“Adieu the clang of war’s alarms! To other deeds my soul is strung, And sweeter notes shall now be sung; My harp shall all its powers reveal, To tell the tale my heart must feel; Love, Love alone, my lyre shall claim, In songs of bliss and sighs of flame.”
― Kathleen Baldwin, quote from Mistaken Kiss
“Strange about learning; the farther I go the more I see that I never knew even existed. A short while ago I foolishly thought I could learn everything - all the knowledge in the world. Now I hope only to be able to know of its existence, and to understand one grain of it. Is there time?”
― Daniel Keyes, quote from Des fleurs pour Algernon
The Drawing of the T...
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Swan SongBookQuoters 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.
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