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

Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world. We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.

— Anthony Doerr

Graceful. Lean. Coordinated as she whirls, though how she knows what dancing is, [her grandfather] could never guess. The song plays on. He lets it go too long. The antenna is still up, probably dimly visible against the sky, the whole attic might as well shine like a beacon. But in the candlelight, in the sweet rush of a concerto, Marie-Laure bites her lower lip, and her face gives off a secondary glow, reminding him of the marshes beyond the town walls, in those winter disks when the sun has set but isn't fully swallowed, and big patches of red pools of light burn - places he used to go with his brother, in what seems like lifetimes ago.

— Anthony Doerr

He never cried, not even when his alarm went off. Swaddled in his Moses basket, wires trailing out the bottom, his monitor flashing green, green, green, his entire four-pound body motionless except his eyelids, it seemed he understood everything I was working so hard to understand: his mother's love, his brother's ceaseless crying: he was already forgiving me my shortcomings as a father; he was a distillation of a dozen generations, all stripped into a single flame and stowed still-burning inside the slip of his ribs. I'd hold him to the window, and he's stare out into the night, blue tributaries of veins pulsing his neck, his big eyelids slipping down now and then, and it would feel as if tethers were falling away, and the two of us were gently rising, through the glass, through the trees, through the interweaving layers of atmosphere, into whatever was beyond the sky.

— Anthony Doerr

Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.

— Anthony Doerr

He sweeps her hair back from her ears; he swings her above his head. He says she is his émerveillement. Furthermore, he says he will never leave her, not in a million years.

— Anthony Doerr

How about peaches, dear?” murmurs Madame Mane, and Marie-Laure can hear a can opening, juice slopping into a bowl. Seconds later, she’s eating wedges of wet sunlight.

— Anthony Doerr

I am only alive because I have not yet died.

— Anthony Doerr

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

I’m thankful that everything sweet is sweet because it is finite.

— Anthony Doerr