Best Quotes from All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr with Page Numbers

The tide climbs. The moon hangs small and yellow and gibbous.

The walled city on its granite headland, drawing ever closer, looks like an unholy tooth, something black and dangerous, a final abscess to be lanced away.

Fill them up, her great-uncle has taught her, whenever you can. Who knows when the water will go out again.

Every second is a second lost.

What is it to be lost? What is it to be lost in a city of your own making?

He drags open the cellar door and pauses a moment, vision swimming.

But who is there to answer?

Here, people whisper, the Germans have renovated two kilometers of subterranean corridors under the medieval walls.

We are Malouins first, say the people of Saint-Malo. Bretons next. French if there’s anything left over.

In stormy light, its granite glows blue.

“But if the keeper threw the diamond into the sea, thereby delivering it to its rightful recipient, the goddess would lift the curse.”

“To really touch something, she is learning—the bark of a sycamore tree in the gardens; a pinned stag beetle in the Department of Etymology; the exquisitely polished interior of a scallop shell in Dr. Geffard’s workshop—is to love it.”

“You have to believe the story.”

“The world pivots and rumbles. Crows shout, brakes hiss, someone to her left bangs something metal with what might be a hammer.”

“We act in the interest of peace.”

“Calm yourself. Listen.”

“You ought to send her away.”

“Old friend.”

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

“But I believe in you. I think you’ll do something great.”

Calm yourself, she thinks. Concentrate on filling your lungs, draining them. Filling them again.

The world settles. From outside comes a light tinkling, fragments of glass, perhaps, falling into the streets. It sounds both beautiful and strange, as though gemstones were raining from the sky.

You are too high in the house.

Smoke: her great-uncle says it is a suspension of particles, billions of drifting carbon molecules. Bits of living rooms, cafés, trees. People.

In the absolute blackness, his vision is webbed with a thousand traveling wisps of red and blue. Flames? Phantoms?

Are we dead? he shouts into the dark. Have we died?

He tries to sit up, but the ceiling has become lower, and he strikes his head.

The appetite for oxygen is such that objects heavier than housecats are dragged into the flames.

Wherever her great-uncle is, could he have survived this? Could anyone? Has she?

Trapped in the dark, Werner feels for solace in the light.

“There is only chance in this world, chance and physics.”

“A diamond, the locksmith reminds himself, is only a piece of carbon compressed in the bowels of the earth for eons.”

“We are lucky to have him, Marie.”

“Every outcome has its cause, and every predicament has its solution.”

“The sea does not belong to tyrants.”

“You can go back to Paris or you can stay here or you can go on.”

“You must be famished.”

“I have the whole world here, and in my radios. Right at my fingertips.”

“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”

“You’ve held the diamond. You’ve felt its power.”

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

What if Germany has held the city? What if Germans are right now marching from house to house, shooting whomever they please?

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

It would keep swinging, she understood, after she and her father left the Panthéon, after she had fallen asleep that night.

Please. As though everything in the war to this point was tolerable to twenty-one-year-old Frank Volkheimer but not this final injustice.

Here, in this peninsular fortress just outside Saint-Malo, cut off from the retreating lines, it seems only a matter of time.

To make reparations. As appropriate a place as any.

Dark again. Light again.

Sometimes, in the darkness, Werner thinks the cellar may have its own faint light.

What is left of the street.

"Your problem, Werner, is that you still believe you own your life."

"Doesn’t look like much, does he? Hardly a couple of ounces of feathers and bones. But that bird can fly to Africa and back. Powered by bugs and worms and desire."

"Those bright mists and your gun on your shoulder and your eyes set firmly in your head?"

"Why else do any of this if not to become who we want to be?"

"It’s just a bird."

"The entropy of a closed system never decreases."

"You must never stop believing. That’s the most important thing."

"Doing nothing is as good as collaborating."

"Every rumor carries a seed of truth, Etienne."

"It is better than not acting at all. Think of your nephew. Think of Marie-Laure."

Move. Go.

Protect me now, stone, if you are a protector.

Make no noise.

She can get to none of them.

His footfalls cross the landing. One-pause-two one-pause-two.

Even the heart, which in higher animals, when agitated, pulsates with increased energy, in the snail under similar excitement, throbs with a slower motion.

Slow the heart. Flex your feet. Make no sound.

A multitude of sanctuaries—gardens full of bright green wind; kingdoms of hedges; deep pools of forest shade through which butterflies float thinking only of nectar.

If he touches me, she thinks, I will tear out his eyes.

The heart scrambling to deliver oxygenated blood, the mind scrambling to unravel the situation.

"What is essential is invisible to the eye."

"You can’t see the light, just the absence of it."

"We are all capable of extraordinary things, just look at the world around us."

"It is in the depth of darkness that we often find our greatest light."

"Perhaps it is only when we are lost that we can truly find ourselves."

"They say that long ago, silence was a kind of music."

"If there’s no reason to believe, then why does everything exist?"

"The world is a much larger place than we can ever hope to fathom."

"In silence, we are given the opportunity to hear our own thoughts."

"Keep your eyes open to the wonders of this world, even in the darkest of times."

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

You will survive, ma chérie.

I am only alive because I have not yet died.

Do not open the can. He will hear you.

In the blackness, he crawls toward Volkheimer: a comfort to find his friend’s huge knee in the darkness.

Every other structure, it seems, is burning or collapsing, but here in front of him is the inverse in miniature: the city remains, but the house he occupies is gone.

Lord Our God Your Grace is a purifying fire.

She could fill the empty can of beans.

Breathing. Dying. Dreaming.

How did Jutta understand so much more about how the world worked?

"I have been feeling very clearheaded lately and what I want to write about today is the sea. It contains so many colors."

"It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel."

"Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties."

"A day to remember."

"He made her the glowing hot center of his life; he made her feel as if every step she took was important."

"I will not—"

"It feels appropriate somehow, to have reached the edge of the continent, to have only the hammered sea left in front of him."

"Are you still there, Papa?"

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

"Sometimes it seems worth the cost of my own life just to have that connection."

"But everyone faced it squarely and decided to do their duty to the end."

"In his mind he hears the girl whisper: He is here. He will kill me."

"Whatever energy Etienne has left goes into quieting the noise in his head."

"The universe is full of fuel."

"Fill your lungs. Beat your heart."

"What would happen if the goddess took away the curse? Would the fires go out, would the earth heal over, would doves return to the windowsills?"

"Every memory he ever made. Above Fort National, the dawn becomes deeply, murderously clear."

"We’ll die together, Ned my friend."

"Is there much difference between gone or resolved to go?"

"In the end, somehow the same."

Frau Elena works close by, wearing a torn ski jacket she has found, mumbling to herself in French or singing songs from childhood.

But they do not wake.

Sometimes, in dreams, she stands with him over a table strewn with gears and belts and motors.

A little.

“Not much longer now,” says Frau Elena.

Jutta does not allow herself to make a single sound.

What young women are left dress themselves in rags, cower in basements.

She finds she can sleep only two or three hours at a time.

He might be in a cell, in a ditch, a thousand miles away.

You must never stop believing.

On winter afternoons he moves among the antennas like a sailor through rigging.

The small, secure weight of tools along his belt, the smell of intermittent rain, and the crystalline brilliance of the clouds at dusk: these are the only times when Volkheimer feels marginally whole.

But on most days, especially the warm ones, life exhausts him.

Does he know to whom these items belonged?

What you could be.

He was small. He had white hair and ears that stuck out.

Even the largest of them.

Some griefs can never be put right.

Did he take it from you?

That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much.

She lives to see the century turn. She lives still.

Climb, pause, catch your breath. Climb again.

He can always begin again.

It’s a beautiful morning, Mamie, isn’t it? Very beautiful.

That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks.

And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths?

Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.

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

The air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken.

She listens until his footsteps fade.