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There has always been a sliver of panic in him, deeply buried, when it comes to his daughter: a fear that he is no good as a father, that he is doing everything wrong. That he never quite understood the rules.
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Anthony Doerr |
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It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio. --Joseph Goebbels
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Anthony Doerr |
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Harold Bazin loves to talk
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Anthony Doerr |
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It's the absence of all the bodies, she thinks, that allows us to forget. It's that the sod seals them over.
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Anthony Doerr |
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If your same blood doesn't run in the arms and legs of the person you're next to, you can't trust anything.
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Anthony Doerr |
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Did you know," says Marie-Laure, "that the chance of being hit by lightning is one in one million? Dr. Geffard taught me that." "In one year or in one lifetime?" "I'm not sure." "You should have asked."
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Anthony Doerr |
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He feels ragged. For weeks logic has been failing him. The stone the museum has asked him to protect is not real. If it were, the museum would have sent men already to collect it. Why then, when he puts a magnifying glass to it, do its depths reveal tiny daggers of flames?
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Anthony Doerr |
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Every process must by law decay.
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Anthony Doerr |
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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.
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Anthony Doerr |
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That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.
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Anthony Doerr |
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appear,
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Anthony Doerr |
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stirs the fire below them with a steel pole; a
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Anthony Doerr |
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Why doesn't glue stick to the inside of the bottle, Frau Elena?
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Anthony Doerr |
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someone?
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Anthony Doerr |
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At night
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Anthony Doerr |
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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. "Now," he says in the clearest French"
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Anthony Doerr |
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He sees what other people don't. What the war did to dreamers.
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Anthony Doerr |
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la pomme
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Anthony Doerr |
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From the molten basements of the world, two hundred miles down, it comes. One crystal in a seam of others. Pure carbon, each atom linked to four equidistant neighbors, perfectly knit, tetrahedral, unsurpassed in hardness. Already it is old: unfathomably so. Incalculable eons tumble past. The earth shifts, shrugs, stretches. One year, one day, one hour, a great upflow of magma gathers a seam of crystals and drives it toward the surface, mile..
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Anthony Doerr |
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All the Light We Cannot Seeby Anthony Doerr 4.27 of 5 stars 4.27 avg rating -- 102,371 ratings published 2014 Librarian note: an alternate cover for this edition can be found here. Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of l ...more That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much. Only the strongest people can turn away from feelings like that..
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Anthony Doerr |
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Parisian cousins nobody has heard from in decades now write letters begging for capons, hams, hens. The dentist is selling wine through the mail.
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Anthony Doerr |
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Radio: it ties a million ears to a single mouth. Out of loudspeakers all around Zollverein, the staccato voice of the Reich grows like some imperturbable tree; its subjects lean toward its branches as if toward the lips of God. And when God stops whispering, they become desperate for someone who can put things right.
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Anthony Doerr |
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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.
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Anthony Doerr |
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pilaster, probably meant to anchor a
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Anthony Doerr |
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smoldering skeletons of the seafront
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Anthony Doerr |
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The skin around the assistant director's eyes stretches.
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humor
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Anthony Doerr |
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That little rock you're so curious about may have seen Alaric sack Rome; it may have glittered in the eyes of Pharaohs. Scythian queens might have danced all night wearing it. Wars might have been fought over it.
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Anthony Doerr |
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beach. Everyone who can must work to strengthen
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Anthony Doerr |
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his daughter is so curious, so resilient. There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing. That's how it feels right now, he thinks, kneeling beside her, rinsing her hair: 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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Anthony Doerr |
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Between whatever has happened already and whatever is to come hovers an invisible borderland, the known on one side and the unknown on the other.
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Anthony Doerr |
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He waits until dark. Marie-Laure sits in the mouth of the wardrobe, the false back open, and listens to her uncle switch on the microphone and the transmitter in the attic. His mild voice speaks numbers into the garret. Then music plays, soft and low, full of cellos tonight . . .
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Anthony Doerr |
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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?
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Anthony Doerr |
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Sometimes, in the darkness, Werner thinks the cellar may have its own faint light, perhaps emanating from the rubble, the space going a bit redder as the August day above them progresses toward dusk. After a while, he is learning, even total darkness is not quite darkness; more than once he thinks he can see his spread fingers when he passes them in front of his eyes.
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Anthony Doerr |
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too. Who knows when the water will go out again. Her fingers travel back to the cathedral
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Anthony Doerr |
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The fires pool and strut; they flow up the sides of the ramparts like tides; they splash into alleys, over rooftops, through a carpark. Smoke chases dust; ash chases smoke. A newsstand floats, burning.
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Anthony Doerr |
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A corner of the night sky, beyond a wall of trees, blooms red. In the lurid, flickering light, he sees that the airplane was not alone, that the sky teems with them, a dozen swooping back and forth, racing in all directions, and in a moment of disorientation, he feels that he's looking not up but down, as though a spotlight has been shined into a wedge of bloodshot water, and the sky has become the sea, and the airplanes are hungry fish, ha..
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Anthony Doerr |
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He blinks; he has to swallow back tears.
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Anthony Doerr |
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thumb. Marie-Laure's father is principal locksmith for the National Museum of Natural History. Between the laboratories, warehouses, four separate public museums, the menagerie, the greenhouses, the acres of medicinal and decorative gardens in the Jardin des Plantes, and a dozen gates and pavilions, her father estimates there are twelve thousand locks in the entire museum complex. No one else knows enough to disagree. All morning he stands ..
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Anthony Doerr |
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To be a parent and take an occasional day off from being a parent is a special kind of joy--a lightening, a sweetness made sweeter by its impermanence. We buy tickets, find our seats. The
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Anthony Doerr |
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whispers Neumann One. His right thigh jogs up and down
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Anthony Doerr |
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The Americans fished on, not hoping for much anymore, perhaps for a miracle, searching for small things to be happy about, because they were Americans and this was what their upbringings had taught them to do. They found a brief happiness, for example, in the potato chips that came to their rooms on expensive china and in the genuinely hopeful way the hotel girl asked if they'd had any luck. They took pleasure in their morning calls to the ..
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Anthony Doerr |
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Her fingers walk the tightropes of sentences;
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Anthony Doerr |
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Before that, before it was ever a hotel at all, five full centuries ago, it was the home of a wealthy privateer who gave up raiding ships to study bees in the pastures outside Saint-Malo, scribbling in notebooks and eating honey straight from combs. The crests above the door lintels still have bumblebees carved into the oak; the ivy-covered fountain in the courtyard is shaped like a hive. Werner's favorites are five faded frescoes on the ce..
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Anthony Doerr |
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We are Malouins first, say the people of Saint-Malo.
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Anthony Doerr |