Anthony Doerr quotes:

WWII is something contemporary readers already know a lot about. If our schools are doing their jobs, they know about the invasion of Normandy, the Hitler Youth, the Holocaust, and at least a few of the horrors of the Eastern Front.

I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff.

I write reviews of science books for the Boston Globe, so I like to give science books.

My sister-in-law is a painter, and I'll say, how long did it take you to paint that painting. She'll say, It took me maybe three days, but it took me all my life to get the skills to paint that painting.

It took me about three years to write About Grace. I wasn't teaching two of those years, so I was working eight-hour days, five days a week. And it would include research and reading - it wasn't just a blank page, laying down words.

I feel like it has gone very fast for me, but I feel like it wasn't instantaneous, at all. I was getting a lot of rejections. I just got very lucky and it happened quickly for me. I don't feel like I'm a prodigy or something.

Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.

I guess whatever maturity is there may be there because I've been keeping a journal forever. In high school my friends would make fun of me - you're doing your man diary again. So I was always trying to translate experience into words.

I do fish. I think there is a connection between thinking and fishing mostly because you spend a lot of time up to your waist in water without a whole lot to keep your mind busy.

In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.

To consider water on any scale was to confront a boundless repetition of small events. There were the tiny wonders: rain drops, snow crystals, grains of frost aligned on a blade of grass; and there were the wonders so immense it seemed impossible to get his mind around them: global wind, oceanic currents, storms that broke like waves over whole mountain ranges. p 46"

For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.

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

It was not,' said Jutta, reaching the limits of her French, 'very easy to be good then.

It was hard to live through the early 1940s in France and not have the war be the center from which the rest of your life spiraled.

Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It's wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original.

When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don't you do the same?

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.

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.

Short stories are wonderful and extremely challenging, and the joy of them, because it only takes me three or four months to write, I can take more risks with them. It's just less of your life invested.

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

The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we're not careful, pretty soon we're gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack.

I found my first novel difficult. I don't want to make it sound like it's any more difficult than driving a cab or going to any other job, but there are so many opportunities for self-doubt, that you just kind of need to soldier on.

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

What the war did to dreamers

What the war did to dreamers.

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

He wondered if such things were born into people. If perhaps we cannot alter who we are - if the place we come from dictates the place we will end up."

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

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 always told my dad I'd play professional football.

Travel definitely affects me as a writer.

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

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.

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

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

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor-it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.

My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.

We live through books; we have adventures in them, we lead alternative lives through them. We expand our memories through them. And that sometimes art can offer us more intense experiences of the world than life itself can.

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

I used to think...that I had to be careful with how much I lived. As if life was a pocketful of coins. You only got so much and you didn't want to spend it all in one place...But now I know that life is the one thing in the world that never runs out. I might run out of mine, and you might run out of yours, but the world will never run out of life. And we're all very lucky to be part of something like that.

I went to Europe three times, I read dozens and dozens of books, I studied thousands of photos. But I always supplemented that research with imagination; research might give you detail, but imagination supplies the direction in which to apply all that detail.

A real diamond is never perfect.

Radio - and perhaps airplanes, and then of course, the atom bomb - was the preeminent technology of the first half of the 20th century. It was how the Third Reich controlled its citizens, spread lies, and disseminated fear.

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

Donâ??t you want to be alive before you die?

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

Things hardly ever work on the first try. We'll make another, a better one.

It wasn't until I was 26 or 25 when I started sending work out to magazines.

You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't.

You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.