The urge to know scrapes against the inability to know.

I was a nerdy kid.

— Anthony Doerr

“he moved neither forward nor backward in time, but merely endured variations of the same day over and over. Maybe he was the one…

— Anthony Doerr

“Open your eyes, the Frenchman on the radio used to say, and see what you can with them before they close forever.”

— Anthony Doerr

“Just when we think we have a system, ...the system collapses. Just when we know our way around, we get lost. Just when we…

— Anthony Doerr

“An hour passed and another and then, like a glass of water overfilled - the meniscus inverting, going convex, gravity pulling at the edges,…

— Anthony Doerr

“For dinner, he orders wild boar cooked with fresh mushrooms. And a full bottle of Bordeaux. Especially during wartime, such things remain important. They…

— Anthony Doerr

“Do you know what happens, Etienne,” says Madame Manec from the other side of the kitchen, “when you drop a frog in a pot…

— Anthony Doerr

“You ever hope for something so much? So much you can't sleep, so much your skull hurts? But the thing is, you don't even…

— Anthony Doerr

“Hope was a sunrise, a friend in the alley, a whisper in an empty corridor.”

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

“...the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.”

— Anthony Doerr

“silent desperation of everything they never said - gaps and absences in every conversation, the past circumscribing the present, the future hemming in the…

— Anthony Doerr

“She is in charge of everything, but no one knows. It is a tremendous burden, she says, to be responsible for every little thing,…

— Anthony Doerr

I guess you could say I've been writing all my life.

— Anthony Doerr

Only Numbers. Pure math. You have to accustom yourself to thinking that way.

— Anthony Doerr