Anthony Doerr, All The Light We Cannot See Quotes

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

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.

I am only alive because I have not yet died.

There are, he assures her, no such things as curses. There is luck, maybe, bad or good. A slight indication of each day toward success or failure. But no curses.

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.

Silence is the fruit of occupation.

How about peaches, dear?” murmurs Madame Manec, and Marie-Laure can hear a can opening, juice slopping into a bowl. Seconds later, she’s eating wedges of wet sunlight.

---on her best days, she glimpses the limitless span of millennia behind her: millions of years, tens of millions.

On the rue de la Crosse, the Hotel of Bees becomes almost weightless for a moment, lifted in a spiral of flame, before it begins to rain the pieces back to the earth

The universe is full of fuel.

The very life of any creature is a quick-fading spark in fathomless darkness.

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

Don't you ever get tired of believing, Madame? Don't you ever want proof?

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.

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.

They can march for days without eating. They impregnate every schoolgirl they meet.

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.

What the war did to the dreamers.

War is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity: chocolate or bullets or parachute silk.

What the war did to dreamers.

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.