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c21d830
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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.
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Anthony Doerr |
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cc12010
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If only life were like a Jules Verne novel, thinks Marie-Laure, and you could page ahead when you most needed to, and learn what would happen.
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Anthony Doerr |
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22d4dfa
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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.
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Anthony Doerr |
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47430c7
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Everyone should behave as if he carries the real thing. The locksmith reties the stone inside the bag and slips it back into his rucksack.
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Anthony Doerr |
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2ecd629
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It was enough when Werner was a boy, wasn't it? A world of wildflowers blooming up through the shapes of rusty cast-off parts. A world of berries and carrot peels and Frau Elena's fairy tales. Of the sharp smell of tar, and trains passing, and bees humming in the window boxes. String and spit and wire and a voice on the radio offering a loom on which to spin his dreams.
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Anthony Doerr |
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d9c6448
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I wasn't trying to reach England. or Paris. I thought that if I made the broadcast powerful enough, my brother would hear me. That I could bring him some peace, protect him as he had always protected me." You'd play your brother's own voice to him? After he died?" "And Debussy." Did he ever talk back?" The attic ticks. What ghosts sidle along the walls right now, trying to overhear? She can almost taste her great-uncle's fright in the ai..
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radio
ghosts
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Anthony Doerr |
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5274d70
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Entropy is the degree of randomness or disorder in a system, Doctor." His eyes fix on Werner's for a heartbeat, a glance both warm and chilling. "Disorder. You hear the commandant say it. You hear your bunk masters say it. There must be order. Life is chaos, gentlemen. And what we represent is an ordering to that chaos. Even down to the genes. We are ordering the evolution of the species. Winnowing out the inferior, the unruly, the chaff. T..
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Anthony Doerr |
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01af272
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And one cold Tuesday in December, when Marie-Laure has been blind for over a year, her father walks her up rue Cuvier to the edge of the Jardin des Plantes. "Here, ma cherie, is the path we take every morning. Through the cedars up ahead is the Grand Gallery." "I know, Papa." He picks her up and spins her around three times. "Now," he says, "you're going to take us home." Her mouth drops open. "I want you to think of the model, Marie." "But..
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father-s-love
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Anthony Doerr |
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d890fd6
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How can one country make another change its clocks? What if everybody refuses?" "Then a lot of people will be early. Or late."
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Anthony Doerr |
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32ce2bd
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Is it right," Jutta says, "to do something only because everyone else is doing it?" Doubts: slipping in like eels."
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Anthony Doerr |
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f76c71a
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Lately the commandant speaks more and more intimately of the fuhrer and the latest thing- prayers, petroleum, loyalty- that he requires. The fuhrer requires trustworthiness, electricity, boot leather. Werner is beginning to see, approaching his sixteenth birthday, that what the fuhrer really requires is boys. Great rows of them walking to the conveyor belt to climb on. Give up cream for the fuhrer, sleep for the fuhrer, aluminum for the fuh..
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anthony-doerr
ww2
wwii
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Anthony Doerr |
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27a29e7
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Ready?" He sounds like her father when he was about to say something silly. In her memory, Marie-Laure hears the two policemen: People have been arrested for less. And Madame Manec: Don't you want to be alive before you die? "Yes."
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Anthony Doerr |
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3cf708b
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They go down the ladder and clamber out through the wardrobe. No soldiers wait in the hall with guns drawn. Nothing seems different at all. 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. Etienne laughs as though to himself. "Do you remember what Madame said about the boiling frog?" "Yes, Uncle." "I ..
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Anthony Doerr |
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543297e
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Warner laces his boots and sings the songs and marches the marches, acting less out of duty than out of a time worn desire to be dutiful.
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war
werner
german
duty
germany
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Anthony Doerr |
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1c4579d
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and Werner sees six-year-old Jutta lean toward him, Frau Elena kneading bread in the background, a crystal radio in his lap, the cords of his soul not yet severed.
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Anthony Doerr |
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ca2ebcb
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Werner and his younger sister, Jutta, are raised at Children's House, a clinker-brick two-story orphanage on Viktoriastrasse whose rooms are populated with the coughs of sick children and the crying of newborns and battered trunks inside which drowse the last possessions of deceased parents: patchwork dresses, tarnished wedding cutlery, faded ambrotypes of fathers swallowed by the mines.
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Anthony Doerr |
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829dd93
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Marie-Laure will indeed smell something, whether because her uncle is passing coffee grounds beneath her nose, or because they really are flying over the coffee trees of Boreno, she does not want to decide (151).
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Anthony Doerr |
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ebc37ba
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You know how diamonds--how all crystals--grow, Laurette? By adding microscopic layers, a few thousand atoms every month, each atop the next. Millennia after millennia. That's how stories accumulate too.
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Anthony Doerr |
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b427dc7
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He says, "You are very brave." She lowers the bucket. "What is your name?" He tells her. She says, "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?" He says, "Not in years. But today. Today maybe I did."
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Anthony Doerr |
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7b386fc
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There was a man who used that transmitter you have. Who broadcast lessons about science. When I was a boy. I used to listen to them with my sister." "That was the voice of my grandfather. You heard him?" "Many times. We loved them." The window glows. The slow sandy light of dawn permeates the room. Everything transient and aching; everything tentative. To be here, in this room, high in this house, out of the cellar, with her: it is like med..
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Anthony Doerr |
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0f0083d
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If only she had begged him to stay. Now everything in the house scares her: the creaking stairs, shuttered windows, empty rooms. The clutter and silence. Etienne tries performing silly experiments to cheer her: a vinegar volcano, a tornado in a bottle. "Can you hear it, Marie? Spinning in there?" She does not feign interest. Madame Manec brings her omelets, cassoulet, brochettes of fish, fabricating miracles out of ration tickets and the dr..
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Anthony Doerr |
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1491598
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He says, "You are very brave." She lowers the bucket. "What is your name?" He tells her. She says, "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?" He says, "Not in years. But today. Today maybe I did."
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Anthony Doerr |
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638445a
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She reaches for his hand, sets something in his palm, and squeezes his hand into a fist. "Goodbye, Werner." "Goodbye, Marie-Laure."
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Anthony Doerr |
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1d43ede
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In her memory, Marie-Laure hears the two policemen: People have been arrested for less. And Madame Manec: Don't you want to be alive before you die?
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Anthony Doerr |
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5c1ff8e
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Lord Our God Your Grace is a purifying fire.
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Anthony Doerr |
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15ffaf7
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Five boys later, it is Frederick's turn. Frederick, who clearly cannot see well without his glasses. Who has not been cheering when each bucketful of water finds its mark. Who is frowning at the prisoner as though he recognizes something there. And Werner knows what Frederick is going to do. Frederick has to be nudged forward by the boy behind him. The upperclassman hands him a bucket and Frederick pours it out on the ground. Bastian steps ..
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Anthony Doerr |
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766dee2
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But he didn't have language for what he really wanted to say; he couldn't explain how her wildness that day, on the road, had thrilled him as much as it terrified him.
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Anthony Doerr |
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d3389da
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Maybe living was no more than getting swept over a riverbed and eventually out to sea, no choices to make, only the vast, formless ocean ahead, the frothing waves, the lightless tomb of its depths.
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Anthony Doerr |
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3500ca3
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She wants very badly for her father to say, Yes, that's it absolutely, ma cherie, but he says nothing.
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Anthony Doerr |
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32e4811
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Tucked between the last two pages, she finds an old sealed envelope. He has written For Frederick across the front. Frederick: the bunkmate Werner used to write about, the boy who loved birds. He sees what other people don't. What the war did to dreamers.
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Anthony Doerr |
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c0cdb70
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sheets of yellow flowers glow in the fields, and Jutta wonders if any of them grow over the bones of her brother. Before dark, a well-dressed man with a prosthetic leg boards the train. He sits beside her and lights a cigarette. Jutta clutches her bag between her knees; she is certain that he was wounded in the war, that he will try to start a conversation, that her deficient French will betray her. Or that Max will say something. Or that t..
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Anthony Doerr |
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b77889a
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He and Werner eat their first meal in their starchy new uniforms at a long wooden table in the refectory. Some boys talk in whispers, some sit alone, some gulp food as if they have not eaten in days. Through three arched windows, dawn sends a sheaf of hallowed golden rays. Frederick flutters his fingers and asks, "Do you like birds?" "Sure." "Do you know about hooded crows?"
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Anthony Doerr |
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b6a8c2c
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Marie-Laure sits among them, wondering who will cave, who will tattle, who will be the bravest. Who will lie on her back and let her last breath curl up to the ceiling as a curse upon the invaders.
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Anthony Doerr |
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a1af3fe
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That Dr. Hauptmann might have ties so far up--that the telephone on his desk connects him with men a hundred miles away who could probably wag a finger and send a dozen Messerschmitts streaming up from an airfield to strafe some city--intoxicates Werner. We live in exceptional times.
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Anthony Doerr |
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bb1b183
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That afternoon, long after the stool has been put away and the waltzes have stopped, while Werner sits with his transceiver listening to nothing, a little redheaded girl in a maroon cape emerges from a doorway, maybe six or seven years old, small for her age, with big clear eyes that remind him of Jutta's. She runs across the street to the park and plays there alone, beneath the budding trees, while her mother stands on the corner and bites..
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war
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Anthony Doerr |
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b1ed0d9
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He says, "This hotel is very cheap, ma cherie. The innkeeper behind the desk said our room was forty francs a night but only twenty francs if we made our own bed." He listens to her breathe. "So I said, 'Oh, we can make our own bed.' And he said, 'Right, I'll get you some nails and wood.'" Marie-Laure still does not smile."
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Anthony Doerr |
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e098b9c
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The weather in this place: you can feel it between your fingers.
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Anthony Doerr |
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8ed5f2a
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Fill your lungs. Beat your heart.
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Anthony Doerr |
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646e224
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Looking to salvage one shining thing from the mire.
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Anthony Doerr |
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f188100
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Teacups drift off shelves. Paintings slip off nails. In another
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Anthony Doerr |
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fdd345d
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The walls could fall away, even the whole city, and the brightness of that feeling would not wane. The
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Anthony Doerr |
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f810d71
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he thinks [...] as though his love for his daughter will outstrip the limits of his body. The walls could fall away, even the whole city, and the brightness of that feeling would not wane.
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fatherly-love
parental-love
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Anthony Doerr |
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4743a64
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Cold demanded a sharper, simpler view of things: in those temperatures death hovered at the margins, offering clarity, providing precision. But it blurred things, too: the border between dreams and wakefulness, the way it pulled life from fingers and toes, and released them reluctantly, temporarily. The way the wind came, like news from another, more tenuous world, and stirred the trees.
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Anthony Doerr |
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f5ba72c
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Then a state-sponsored play out of Berlin begins: a story of invaders sneaking into a village at night. All twelve children sit riveted. In the play, the invaders pose as hook-nosed department-store owners, crooked jewelers, dishonorable bankers; they sell glittering trash; they drive established village businessmen out of work. Soon they plot to murder German children in their beds. Eventually a vigilant and humble neighbor catches on. Pol..
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Anthony Doerr |