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They look like scarecrows shipping west to be staked in some terrible garden.
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Anthony Doerr |
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He scans the field. Trees, sky, hay. Darkness falling like velvet. Already a few pale stars. Marie-Laure breathes the measured breath of sleep. 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. He can feel its tiny weight there, as though he has slipped it inside his own mind: a knot.
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Anthony Doerr |
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6730d29
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extravagances unheard of a year before. Frau Elena buys a new couch upholstered in orange corduroy, and a range with burners in black rings; three new Bibles arrive from the consistory in Berlin; a laundry boiler is delivered to the back door. Werner gets new trousers; Jutta gets her own pair of shoes. Working telephones ring in the houses of neighbors. One afternoon, on the walk home from school, Werner stops outside the drugstore and pres..
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Anthony Doerr |
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1db5888
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book not so much full of birds as full of evanescence,
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Anthony Doerr |
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accc78c
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obstacles
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Anthony Doerr |
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c9c039f
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We all go back to the mud. Until we rise again in ribbons of light.
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Anthony Doerr |
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b88ac9d
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Every second, walking those two hundred meters, is like leaping into very cold water, in that first instant when the body goes into shock, and everything you are, everything you call your life, disintegrates for an instant, and all you have around you is the water and the cold, your heart trying to send splinters through a block of ice.
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Anthony Doerr |
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6c8ade5
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A person can get up and leave her life. The world is that big.
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Anthony Doerr |
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3634894
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And then I feel the Big Sadness coming on, like there's a shiny and sharp axe blade buried inside my chest. The only way I can stay alive is to remain absolutely motionless so instead of whispering Dear God how could you do this to me, I only whisper Amen
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Anthony Doerr |
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c28a93e
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You want to know? What it's like? To prop up the dam? To keep your fingers plugged in its cracks? To feel like every single breath that passes is another betrayal, another step farther away from what you were and where you were and who you were, another step deeper into the darkness
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Anthony Doerr |
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f89d02b
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Frau Rosenbaum describes the November light in Venice, how it simultaneously hardens and softens everything. "In the evenings that light is like liquid," she sighs. "You want to drink it."
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Anthony Doerr |
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I do not know so. I believe so.
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Anthony Doerr |
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forever, but so long as he kept it, misfortunes would fall on all those he loved one after another in unending rain." "Live forever?" "But if the keeper threw the diamond into the sea, thereby delivering it to its rightful recipient, the goddess would lift the curse. So the prince, now sultan, thought for three days and three nights and finally"
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Anthony Doerr |
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The locusts have no king, yet all of them go out in ranks.
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Anthony Doerr |
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Everybody has misplaced someone,
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Anthony Doerr |
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96e048e
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I don't want to make trouble, Madame." "Isn't doing nothing a kind of troublemaking?" "Doing nothing is doing nothing." "Doing nothing is as good as collaborating."
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Anthony Doerr |
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e26298a
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She thinks: They just say words, and what are words but sounds these men shape out of breath, weightless vapors they send into the air of the kitchen to dissipate and die.
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Anthony Doerr |
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c1ab6e1
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The shell may be broken, and even portions of it removed, and yet after a certain lapse of time the injured parts will be repaired by a deposition of shelly matter at the fractured parts. "There's hope for me yet!" says Etienne, and laughs, and Marie-Laure is reminded that her great-uncle was not always so fearful, that he had a life before this war and before the last one too; that he was once a young man who dwelled in the world and loved..
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Anthony Doerr |
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d688852
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Don't you ever get tired of believing, Madame? Don't you ever want proof?" Madame Manec rests a hand on Marie-Laure's forehead. The thick hand that first reminded her of a gardener's or a geologist's. "You must never stop believing. That's the most important thing."
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Anthony Doerr |
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2d3dee8
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I'm not your mama," hisses Werner. "Come on, now." Frederick's expression is entirely without artifice. Somewhere in the kitchen, the maid is listening. There is no other sound, not of traffic or airplanes or trains or radios or the specter of Frau Schwartzenberger rattling the cage of the elevator. No chanting no singing no silk banners no bands no trumpets no mother no father no slick-fingered commandant dragging a finger across his back...
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Anthony Doerr |
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Marie-Laure taps on her door, waits a hundred heartbeats.
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Anthony Doerr |
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Disgrace is not to fall but to lie.
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Anthony Doerr |
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Someone touches his shoulder. He has to brace himself against the sloping wall to avoid falling over. Marie-Laure stands behind him in her nightdress. The violins spiral down, then back up. Etienne takes Marie-Laure's hand and together, beneath the low, sloping roof--the record spinning, the transmitter sending it over the ramparts, right through the bodies of the Germans and out to sea--they dance. He spins her; her fingers flicker through..
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Anthony Doerr |
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1df2346
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Everything has led to this: the death of his father; all those restless hours with Jutta listening to the crystal radio in the attic; Hans and Herribert wearing their red armbands under their shirts so Frau Elena would not see; four hundred dark, glittering nights at Schulpforta building transceivers for Dr. Hauptmann. The destruction of Frederick. Everything leading to this moment as Werner piles the haphazard Cossack equipment into the sh..
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Anthony Doerr |
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0e899ff
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Over Volkheimer's shoulder, through the cracked rear window of the truck shell, Werner watches a red-haired child in a velvet cape float six feet above the road. She passes through trees and road signs, veers around curves; she is as inescapable as a moon. Werner curls beneath the bench in the back and does not move for hours, bundled in a blanket, refusing tea, tinned meat, while the floating child pursues him through the countryside. Dea..
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Anthony Doerr |
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691f71b
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and dream herself into the mind of the great marine biologist Aronnax, both guest of honor and prisoner on Captain Nemo's great machine of curiosity, free of nations and politics, cruising through the kaleidoscopic wonders of the sea. Oh, to be free! To lie once more in the Jardin des Plantes with Papa. To feel his hands on hers, to hear the petals of the tulips tremble in the wind. He made her the glowing hot center of his life; he made he..
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Anthony Doerr |
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cdb68fd
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Can you imagine one hundred million years? Every summer for the whole life of that plant, its leaves caught what light they could and transformed the sun's energy into itself. Into bark, twigs, stems. Because plants eat light, in much the way we eat food. But then the plant died and fell, probably into water, and decayed into peat, and the peat was folded inside the earth for years upon years--eons in which something like a month or a decad..
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Anthony Doerr |
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The way she tucks her ankles up against her bottom. The way her fingers flutter through the space around her. Each a thing he hopes never to forget.
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Anthony Doerr |
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Could he, by some miracle, keep this going? Could they hide here until the war ends? Until the armies finish marching back and forth above their heads, until all they have to do is push open the door and shift some stones aside and the house has become a ruin beside the sea? Until he can hold her fingers in his palms and lead her out into the sunshine? He would walk anywhere to make it happen, bear anything; in a year or three years or ten,..
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Anthony Doerr |
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He takes her hand to help her over the piles. No shells fall and no rifles crack and the light is soft and shot through with ash. Jutta, he thinks, I finally listened.
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Anthony Doerr |
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b1db8da
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Her voice like a bright, clear window of sky. Her face a field of freckles. He thinks: I don't want to let you go.
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Anthony Doerr |
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She turns her face toward his, and though she cannot see him, he feels he cannot bear her gaze. "Won't you come with me?"
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Anthony Doerr |
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dee5ba1
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smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother's birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.
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Anthony Doerr |
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Something other than ghosts on which his mind can fix.
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Anthony Doerr |
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06c5357
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That winter arrived immediately, all at once -- you could watch it come. Twin curtains of white appeared in the north, white all the way to the sky, driving south like the end of all things. They drove the wind before them and it ran like wolves, like floodwater through a cracked dyke. Cattle galloped the fencelines, bawling. Trees toppled; a barn roof tumbled over the highway. The river changed directions. The wind flung thrushes screaming..
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seasons
winter
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Anthony Doerr |
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5bca57d
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and the post office, where he waits in interminable
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Anthony Doerr |
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109588f
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At the fairgrounds we saw them in the parking lot inhaling the effluvium of carnival, the smells of fried dough, caramel and cinnamon, the flap-flapping of tents, a carousel plinking out music-box songs, voluptuous sounds bouncing down tent ropes and along the trampled dust of the midway. Wind-curled handbills staple-gunned to telephone poles, the hum of gas-powered generators and the gyro truck, the lemonade truck, pretzels and popcorn, ba..
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fairs
senses
food
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Anthony Doerr |
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945e2bf
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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.
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Anthony Doerr |
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7ae20e6
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Death can seem so final, like a blade dropped through the neck. But the nature of death is not at all final. It is not some dark cliff off which we leap. I hope to show you it is merely a fog, something we can peer into and out of, something we can know and face and not necessarily fear. By each life taken from our collective lives we are diminished. But even in death we have much to celebrate. It is only a transition, like so many others.
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Anthony Doerr |
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d012743
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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 colorful 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? When Russian prisoners are chained by threes and fours to fences ..
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Anthony Doerr |
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b28e9d9
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Out in the forsaken city, every other structure, it seems, is burning or collapsing, but here in front of him is the inverse in miniature: the city remains, but the house he occupies is gone.
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Anthony Doerr |
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9acae8b
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But then, right at 2300 hours, Werner sees it, hardly one block from where they parked the Opel: an antenna sliding up alongside a chimney. Not much wider than a broomstick. It rises perhaps twelve meters and then unfolds as if by magic into a simple T. A high house on the edge of the sea. A spectacularly good location from which to broadcast. From street level, the antenna is all but invisible. He hears Jutta's voice: I bet he does these b..
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Anthony Doerr |
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9865416
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Then it resumes, the twin wands of its horns extending, dragging its whorled shell atop the sled of its body. What do you seek, little snail? Do you live only in this one moment, or do you worry like Professor Aronnax for your future?
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Anthony Doerr |
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4ba6990
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Everybody, he is learning, likes to hear themselves talk. Hubris, like the oldest stories. They raise the antenna too high, broadcast for too many minutes, assume the world offers safety and rationality when of course it does not.
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Anthony Doerr |