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and at the Napola school at Schulpforta, one hundred and nineteen twelve- and thirteen-year-olds wait in a queue behind a truck to be handed thirty-pound antitank land mines, boys who, in almost exactly one year, marooned amid the Russian advance, the entire school cut off like an island, will be given a box of the Reich's last bitter chocolate and Wehrmacht helmets salvaged from dead soldiers, and then this final harvest of the nation's yo..
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Anthony Doerr |
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only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.
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Anthony Doerr |
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Smoke: her great-uncle says it is a suspension of particles, billions of drifting carbon molecules. Bits of living rooms, cafes, trees. People.
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Anthony Doerr |
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lunatics
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Anthony Doerr |
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The murex Dr. Geffard keeps on his desk can entertain her for a half hour, the hollow spines, the ridged whorls, the deep entrance; it's a forest of spikes and caves and textures; it's a kingdom. Her
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Anthony Doerr |
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She takes no notice of him; she seems to know nothing but the morning.
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light
notice
knowing
morning
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Anthony Doerr |
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Clair de Lune," a song that makes her think of leaves fluttering, and of the hard ribbons of sand beneath her feet at low tide. The music slinks and rises and settles back to earth,"
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Anthony Doerr |
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It is the obliviousness of our children that saves us.
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Anthony Doerr |
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It's as if the city has become a library of books in an unknown language, the houses great shelves of illegible volumes, the lamps all extinguished.
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Anthony Doerr |
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The sea is only a receptacle for all the prodigious, supernatural things that exist inside it. It is only movement and love; it is the living infinite.
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Anthony Doerr |
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gadrooned
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Anthony Doerr |
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mistakes,
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Anthony Doerr |
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All of it burning. Every memory he ever made. Above Fort National, the dawn becomes deeply, murderously clear. The Milky Way a fading river. He looks across to the fires. He thinks: The universe is full of fuel.
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Anthony Doerr |
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else.
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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...Whoever wins, that's who decides the history.
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lesson
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Anthony Doerr |
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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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Anthony Doerr |
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Only through the hottest fires, whispers the radio, can purification be achieved. Only through the harshest tests can God's chosen rise.
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Anthony Doerr |
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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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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.
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Anthony Doerr |
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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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every timidity eventually turns into regret.
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Anthony Doerr |
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Audubon,
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Anthony Doerr |
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walls, the upturned cars, the barking dogs, the
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Anthony Doerr |
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But she is angry. At Etienne for doing so little, at Madame Manec for doing so much, at her father for not being here to help her understand his absence. At her eyes for failing her. At everything and everyone. Who knew love could kill you?
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Anthony Doerr |
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We are all just tenants here. Even the one thing we believe is ours--the time we're given on earth--does that belong to us?
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Anthony Doerr |
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What treasures they left behind! A gorgeous set of yellow topaz crystals on a gray matrix. A great pink hunk of beryl like a crystallized brain. A violet column of tourmaline from Madagascar that looks so rich he cannot resist the urge to stroke it. Bournonite; apatite on muscovite; natural zircon in a spray of colors; dozens more minerals he cannot name.
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Anthony Doerr |
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crowning the ramparts, drawing an uneven star shape around the entire model. She finds the opening atop the walls where four ceremonial cannons point to
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Anthony Doerr |
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emerveillement.
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Anthony Doerr |
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971b6ec
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We live in exceptional times.
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Anthony Doerr |
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His mother the Ice Queen. The only thing he still had of hers was a book: Snow Crystals, by W. A. Bentley. Inside were thousands of carefully prepared micrographs of snowflakes, each image reproduced in a two-inch square, the crystals white against a field of black, arrayed in a grid, four-by-three, twelve per page.
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Anthony Doerr |
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Artillery has stopped for the moment, and the predawn fires inside the walls take on a steady middle life, an adulthood.
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Anthony Doerr |
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The sky drops silver threads of sleet.
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Anthony Doerr |
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assume the world offers safety and rationality when of course it does not.
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Anthony Doerr |
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bathroom,
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Anthony Doerr |
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he can
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Anthony Doerr |
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Look closely and the picturesque inevitably cracks apart and becomes more interesting.
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Anthony Doerr |
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does not want to decide. They visit Scotland, New York City, Santiago. More than once they put on winter coats and visit the moon. "Can't you feel how lightweight we are, Marie? You can move by hardly twitching a muscle!" He sets her in his wheeled desk chair and pants as he whirls her in circles until she cannot laugh anymore for the pain of it."
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Anthony Doerr |
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He made her the glowing hot center of his life; he made her feel as if every step she took was important.
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Anthony Doerr |
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in the center of her forehead he can see a hole blacker than the blackness around him,
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Anthony Doerr |
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in this world, they do as they're told, they get scared, they move about with only themselves in mind.
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Anthony Doerr |
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The vice minister's wife sits so upright that it seems as if her spine is hewn from oak.
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Anthony Doerr |
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He waits a long time. The captain reviews the fingernails
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Anthony Doerr |
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Now that shell, Laurette, belonged to a violet sea snail, a blind snail that lives its whole life on the surface of the sea. As
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Anthony Doerr |
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should be a wall, her hands find
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Anthony Doerr |