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6d33898
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It strikes Werner just then as wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colourful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing indifference of the world - what pretensions humans have! Why bother to make music when the silence and wind are so much larger? Why light lamps when the darkness will inevitably snuff them?
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Anthony Doerr |
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31f769a
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So really, children, mathematically, all the light is invisible
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Anthony Doerr |
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d62c2bf
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I am only alive because I have not died.
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Anthony Doerr |
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3b414b4
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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. Say
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Anthony Doerr |
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bbc836d
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Why doesn't the wind move the light?
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Anthony Doerr |
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4704446
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I hear they give out poisoned chocolate.
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Anthony Doerr |
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b53e8b7
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He is about to hand the earphone to Jutta when--clear and unblemished, about halfway down the coil--he hears the quick, drastic strikes of a bow dashing across the strings of a violin. He tries to hold the pin perfectly still. A second violin joins the first. Jutta drags herself closer; she watches her brother with outsize eyes. A piano chases the violins. Then woodwinds. The strings sprint, woodwinds fluttering behind. More instruments joi..
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Anthony Doerr |
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eb8064f
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Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever. Her
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Anthony Doerr |
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d7a12ec
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What the war did to the dreamers.
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war
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Anthony Doerr |
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71c61af
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los
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Anthony Doerr |
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cba5b2e
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land mines explode in front
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Anthony Doerr |
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f7390d5
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I always thought, or imagined, that there were these invisible lines trembling in our wake, outlining our trajectories through life, throbbing with electric energy. Lines that sometimes cross one other, or follow in parallel ellipses without ever touching, or meet up for one brief moment and then part. A universe of lines crisscrossing in the void.
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Anthony Doerr |
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8e464ed
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Do we choose who we love?
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Anthony Doerr |
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4900d00
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Sogno alberi che gelavano, che esplodevano nella notte; sogno lupi al galoppo lungo un crinale e labirinti in miniatura sotto la neve. Forse, penso in seguito, erano in realta i sogni degli insetti, che percorrevano l'aria gelida tra lui e loro lungo fili invisibili. Forse erano li da sempre e solo ora riusciva a sintonizzarcisi, come se si trovasse ancora sulla spiaggia e vagasse tra le frequenze con la radiolina a onde corte. I sogni da l..
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insect-quotes
insetti
italian-quotes
sogni
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Anthony Doerr |
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075b52d
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All those Parisian mothers pushing buggies through the Jardin des Plantes or holding up cardigans in department stores--it seemed to him that those women nodded to each other as they passed, as though each possessed some secret knowledge that he did not. How do you ever know for certain that you are doing the right thing? There is pride, too, though--pride that he has done it alone. That his daughter is so curious, so resilient. There is th..
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Anthony Doerr |
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85143ba
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There is luck, maybe, bad or good. A slight inclination of each day toward success or failure. But no curses.
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Anthony Doerr |
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7186d9c
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Firelit rooms lined with books - these are the places in which important things happen.
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Anthony Doerr |
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e6d320c
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Even the poorest pit houses usually possess a state-sponsored Volkempfanger VE301, a mass-produced radio stamped with an eagle and a swastika, incapable of shortwave, marked only for German frequencies. 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.
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history
nazi-germany
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Anthony Doerr |
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5c42e02
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When Werner wakes, it's well past dawn. His head aches and his eyeballs feel heavy. Frederick is already dressed, wearing trousers, an ironed shirt, and a necktie, kneeling against the window with his nose against the glass. "Gray wagtail." He points. Werner looks past him into the naked lindens. "Doesn't look like much, does he?" murmurs Frederick. "Hardly a couple of ounces of feathers and bones. But that bird can fly to Africa and back. ..
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Anthony Doerr |
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93f5f84
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Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever. He
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Anthony Doerr |
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6c36ebb
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Lish' kusok kamennoi kladki otdeliaet Mari-Loru ot kraia Bretani, samogo dal'nego podokonnika Frantsii.
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Anthony Doerr |
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bbe652c
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Mal'chiki vkhodiat v polutemnyi vestibiul'. Pered nimi dvustvorchataia dver'. Frederik nazhimaet knopku, vysoko vnutri doma chto-to liazgaet, i Verner shepchet: - U vas est' lift? Frederik ulybaetsia. Lift s grokhotom polzet vniz i ostanavlivaetsia. Frederik tolkaet dereviannye dveri, mal'chiki vkhodiat. Verner zacharovanno nabliudaet, kak mimo proplyvaet etazh. Kogda kabina ostanavlivaetsia, on sprashivaet: - A mozhno poekhat' eshche raz?
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Anthony Doerr |
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bde916f
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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
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Anthony Doerr |
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8c3666e
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family? Surely more than genes, eye color, flesh. Family was story: truth and struggle and retribution. Family was time. At the other end of the continent Felix was lying in a hospital bed, asleep, surrounded by kin--Soma and the boys, the ghosts of the Chileans he had known, the disappeared, the still-here. Winkler had a single memory of an infant girl at a window. Faces in a dream, phantoms in the periphery. If he had learned anything it ..
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Anthony Doerr |
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7a8dd2a
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And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? 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 ou..
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Anthony Doerr |
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d37307a
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It seems to Werner that in the space 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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14c4690
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Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever
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Anthony Doerr |
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8953c93
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The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light? The
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Anthony Doerr |
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03dafa2
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the voice seems to echo in the architecture of his head
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Anthony Doerr |
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e089351
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she opens her bedroom window and listens to the evening as it settles over the balconies and chimneys, languid and peaceful
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Anthony Doerr |
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5b6248e
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the right thing? There is pride, too,
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Anthony Doerr |
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747a96e
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Cada minuto que passa e um minuto a menos nesta casa. Nesta vida.
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Anthony Doerr |
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9539b2a
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The war drops its question mark. Memos are distributed. The collections must be protected. A small cadre of couriers has begun moving things to country estates. Locks and keys are in greater demand than ever.
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Anthony Doerr |
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392cac8
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town, it says. Depart immediately
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Anthony Doerr |
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89ac15a
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she imagines his head as a cabinet filled with ten thousand little drawers.
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Anthony Doerr |
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cb61ef1
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Los sordos pueden oir los latidos de su propio corazon, frau Elena?
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Anthony Doerr |
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99c67b1
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There is only chance in this world, chance and physics. Anyway,
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Anthony Doerr |
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94078ad
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To shut your eyes is to guess nothing about 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.
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Anthony Doerr |
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ce3a5fe
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There is pride, too, though--pride that he has done it alone. That 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 ..
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Anthony Doerr |
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aadfafe
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And the skies: in one day the sky could travel from green at dawn to a noon-time blue so severe it was almost black to hot silver in the afternoon to roiling burgundy at sunset. Just before night it flowered in yawning, imperial violets. Wedges of mauve, cauldrons of peach - skies more like drugs than colors.
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sky
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Anthony Doerr |
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e134fb5
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How do you ever know for certain that you are doing the right thing? There is pride, too, though--pride that he has done it alone. That 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 lim..
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Anthony Doerr |
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344a2f7
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Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever" (pages"
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Anthony Doerr |
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abcfe9b
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How do you ever know for certain that you are doing the right thing? There
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Anthony Doerr |
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61f25af
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everything else keeps living, that the spinning earth does not pause for even an instant in its trip around the sun.
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Anthony Doerr |