Anthony Doerr Quotes

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

Don’t you want to be alive before you die?

So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

We all come into existence as a single cell, 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.

A real diamond is never perfect.

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.

To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.