Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerris an American author of novels and short stories. He gained widespread recognition for his 2014 novel All the Light We Cannot See, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction...
book europe giving
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.
night storm care
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.
country home vegetables
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.
art memories book
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.
unhappy-person people different
To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.
mother heart cells
We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.
silence pockets language
My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.
baby people done
Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor-it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.
narrative-structure miracle chocolate
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.
language inadequate
It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.
life children light
So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?
hands forever might
Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.
dream book fall
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.
eye forever
Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.