“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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“The point of freewriting is to get past the voice inside your head that tells you your ideas aren't good enough, your words aren't good enough, you're no writer and so forth.”
― M. Molly Backes, quote from The Princesses of Iowa
“For most of the nineteen years of Zachary’s life, Susan had done what parents do when their child turns out to be so different from what they’d imagined—which is to pretend, and pretend, with the wretchedness of hope, that he would be all right. Zach would grow into himself. He’d make friends and take part in life. Grow into it, grow out of it … Variations had played in Susan’s mind on sleepless nights. But her mind had also held the dark relentless beat of doubt: He was friendless, he was quiet, he was hesitant in all his actions, his schoolwork barely adequate. Tests showed an IQ above average, no discernible learning disorders—yet the package of Zachness added up to not quite right. And sometimes Susan’s melody of failure crescendoed with the unbearable knowledge: It was her fault. How”
― Elizabeth Strout, quote from The Burgess Boys
“I felt like that kite. Hanging on by a slender thread, with no certainty or control over which direction life would turn me next.”
― Tracy Brogan, quote from Crazy Little Thing
“In a word, we know that they shall be true disciples of Jesus Christ, walking in the footsteps of His poverty, humility, contempt of the world, charity; teaching the narrow way of God in pure truth, according to the holy Gospel, and not according to the maxims of the world; troubling themselves about nothing; not accepting persons; sparing, fearing and listening to no mortal, however influential he may be. They shall have in their mouths the two-edged sword of the Word of God. They shall carry on their shoulders the bloody standard of the Cross, the Crucifix in their right hand and the Rosary in their left, the sacred Names of Jesus and Mary in their hearts, and the modesty and mortification of Jesus Christ in their own behavior.”
― St. Louis de Montfort, quote from True Devotion to Mary
“It’s WA today, Minna,” called Orson from across the room, Orson’s name for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Orson played second violin with a sloppy serenity, rolling his eyes and sticking out his tongue, his bowing long and sweeping and beautiful even when out of tune. “If you must make a mistake,” he had quoted, “make it a big one.” Was it Heifetz who had said it? Perlman? Zukerman maybe?”
― Patricia MacLachlan, quote from The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt
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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.
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