Anthony Doerr

What are we doing now, Papa?”

“Hoping for a train.”

“What is everybody else doing?”

“They’re hoping too.”

Sometimes the eye of a hurricane is the safest place to be

Is it right to do something only because everyone else is doing it?

“Papa used to say they were like stars in heaven. Like apples in a tree.”

“They are little brown dots, child. Thousands of little brown dots.”

“That sounds ugly.”

The Goddess of History looked down to earth. Only through the hottest fires can purification be

sixteen-year-old named Marie-Laure LeBlanc kneels over a low table covered entirely with a model.

Madame Hébrard, the postmistress, slides an important-looking letter from Berlin into her underpants, takes it home, and starts her evening fire with it.

But to raise one’s hopes is to risk their falling further.

total darkness is not quite darkness

Why bother to make music when the silence and wind are so much larger? Why light lamps when the darkness will inevitably snuff them?