Anthony Doerr

“How few days are left in the lives of anyone. How few hours.”

— Anthony Doerr

“What use are memories when memories can do little more than fade?”

— Anthony Doerr

I read Stephen Crane's 'The Open Boat' when I was 11.

— Anthony Doerr

My ribs ache from all the texts I'll never make time for.

— Anthony Doerr

“How do you ever know for certain that you are doing the right thing?”

— Anthony Doerr

“So really, children, mathematically, all the light is invisible”

— Anthony Doerr

I never played inside as a kid - even in the rain I'd go out.

— Anthony Doerr

“Our shadows are our histories. We drag them everywhere.”

— Anthony Doerr

When I was a boy, all the books I owned fit on a single shelf. Now I have several thousand stacked around…

— Anthony Doerr

“Your problem, Werner,” says Frederick, “is that you still believe you own your life.”

— Anthony Doerr

Maybe scarcity isn't always a bad thing. Maybe scarcity is something to seek out, to fabricate for oneself.

— Anthony Doerr

“That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much. Only the strongest people can turn away from feelings like that.”

— Anthony Doerr

Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that…

— Anthony Doerr

“A foot of steel looks as if it has been transformed into warm butter and gouged by the fingers of a child,”

— Anthony Doerr

“Water was a wild, capricious substance: nothing solid, nothing permanent, nothing as it appeared.”

— Anthony Doerr

“The straining of dreams against the fabric of reality. Growing up meant burying possibilities, one after another.”

— Anthony Doerr

Growing up, I loved to play. Writing was a natural outtake of play. I realize now, having kids, that maybe that's unusual.…

— Anthony Doerr

I feel like it has gone very fast for me, but I feel like it wasn't instantaneous, at all. I was getting…

— Anthony Doerr

Supposedly, some writers work in rowdy coffee shops or compose whole novels to Megadeth, but when I write, I wear a pair…

— Anthony Doerr

“How much easier it would have been if he and Sandy could have fought: a skirmish in the night, some harsh words,…

— Anthony Doerr

You and I can go on YouTube and learn how to fix a tractor engine or learn Farsi. Groups are using those…

— Anthony Doerr

“Maybe the idea was that he could write so many letters, deliver so many envelopes back to Sandy, eventually he'd have sent…

— Anthony Doerr

“They would not get closer to the truth that night. They watched a period of hockey in silence. Winkler insisted on doing…

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

“At night she’d close her eyes and imagine: over a hundred million billion insects hatching and dying every year—all those bristling, pointed,…

— Anthony Doerr

Sometimes, when the neighborhood is silent and the sky is aswarm with the stars and the mind is swirling like a flushed…

— Anthony Doerr

“My prose can be dense. I love to pile on detail. I love to describe. I’m much more reluctant to give the…

— Anthony Doerr

“He says, "This hotel is very cheap, ma cherie. The innkeeper behind the desk said our room was forty francs a night…

— Anthony Doerr

“Toward midnight he sat in the Raney Playground swings with his broken, disloyal heart continuing to pump behind his ribs. Maybe fifty…

— Anthony Doerr

I feel like you are allowed in fiction to embrace imagination and try to enter other worlds. And I feel like you…

— Anthony Doerr

My parents would drive us to Florida every spring in this big old, rusy Suburban, and we'd collect stuff on the beach…

— Anthony Doerr

“The grotto itself comprises its own slick universe, and inside this universe spin countless galaxies: here, in the upturned half of a…

— Anthony Doerr

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

— Anthony Doerr

“Hadn't the actors acted of their own volition?”

— Anthony Doerr

Fiction writing is just an excuse to go discover interesting things.

— Anthony Doerr

“We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.”

— Anthony Doerr

Travel definitely affects me as a writer.

— Anthony Doerr

“When lightning strikes at sea, why don't all the fish die?”

— Anthony Doerr

“The urge to know scrapes against the inability to know.”

— Anthony Doerr

“Somewhere in the ruins above them, the cats are howling.”

— Anthony Doerr