Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
36 quotes
"I am only alive because I have not yet died."
"Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever."
"This, she realizes, is the basis of all fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark."
"What the war did to dreamers."
"War is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity: chocolate or bullets or parachute silk."
"What the war did to the dreamers."
"Posters go up in the market, on tree trunks in the Place Chateaubriand. Voluntary surrender of firearms. Anyone who does not cooperate will be shot."
"But the huge bowl of the sky remains untracked: no zeppelins, no bombers, no superhuman paratroopers, just the last songbirds returning from their winter homes, and the quicksilver winds of spring transmuting into the heavier, greener breezes of summer."
"They can march for days without eating. They impregnate every schoolgirl they meet."
"Stick-thin, alabaster-pale Etienne LeBlanc runs down the rue de Dinan with Madame Ruelle, the baker’s wife, on his heels: the least-robust rescue ever assembled."
"Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world. We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs."
"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."
"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."
"He sweeps her hair back from her ears; he swings her above his head. He says she is his émerveillement. He says he will never leave her, not in a million years."
"A girl got kicked out of the swimming hole today. Inge Hachmann. They said they wouldn’t let us swim with a half-breed. Unsanitary. A half-breed, Werner. Aren’t we half-breeds too? Aren’t we half our mother, half our father?"
"Up and down the lanes, the last unevacuated townspeople wake, groan, sigh. Spinsters, prostitutes, men over sixty. Procrastinators, collaborators, disbelievers, drunks. Nuns of every order. The poor. The stubborn. The blind."
"Don't you ever get tired of believing, Madame? Don't you ever want proof?"
"The moonlight shines and billows; the broken clouds scud above the trees. Leaves fly everywhere. But the moonlight stays unmoved by the wind, passing through clouds, through air, in what seems to Werner like impossibly slow imperturbable rays. They hang across the buckling grass. Why doesn’t the wind move the light?"
"She has no memories of her mother but imagines her as white, a soundless brilliance. Her father radiates a thousand colors, opal, strawberry red, deep russet, wild green; a smell like oil and metal, the feel of a lock tumbler sliding home, the sound of his key rings chiming as he walks."
"That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much. Only the strongest people can turn away from feelings like that."
"The very life of any creature is a quick-fading spark in fathomless darkness."
"It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is."
"The universe is full of fuel."
"---on her best days, she glimpses the limitless span of millennia behind her: millions of years, tens of millions."
"There are, he assures her, no such things as curses. There is luck, maybe, bad or good. A slight inclination of each day towards success or failure. But no curses."