Anthony Doerr

“How wonderful it is to by my age - our age - and learn you were wrong about such a fundamental thing. ”

“Nothing that could fit on this page, or a hundred of these pages, would possibly accommodate all the things I should say to you, all the things you deserve to hear.”

“But have heart. Hope is something that can be very dangerous but without it life would be horribly dry. Impossible, even. Take it from me.”

“You ever hope for something so much? So much you can't sleep, so much your skull hurts? But the thing is, you don't even know if the thing you're wishing for is possible? You don't even know if it could happen? And it's all out of your control?”

“And this feeling, permeating every waking minute, that he had made too many wrong decisions.”

“The whole thing feels like a pool of water that I'm trying to hold in my hands.”

“he could feel his hope wilting.”

“There are comforts in knowing the boundaries of the place you live. Everyone here seems to behave like things are endless.”

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

“the air would get so heavy with moisture he imagined he could feel each bloated molecule as it toppled into his lungs.”

“it was as if these memories had been hibernating in him, not dead but merely dormant, weathering out, and now they stumbled out of their thousand dens.”

“Hope was a sunrise, a friend in the alley, a whisper in an empty corridor.”

“Gates were creaking open inside him - paths, long sealed off, revealed themselves once more.”

“Did dreams, he wondered, when they arrived, make a sound? The smallest kind, like the noise of an embryo being conceived, or a snowflake touching down?”

“To know her is to realize the thousand forms of inquiry.”

“Even the banana plantations, the big, hardy trees on the flanks of Mount St. Andrew, seemed to lilt and acquiesce in the heat.”

“Over time his images of the baby, like photographs handled too often, had worn down and creased, lost their definition. ”

“he moved neither forward nor backward in time, but merely endured variations of the same day over and over. Maybe he was the one trapped underwater, under a Plexiglas floor, while the world moved on, men and women checking in and out of rooms, lugging overstuffed suitcases, the soles of their shoes passing lightly above him.”

“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.”

“His thoughts skirted Sandy and especially Grace as if they were fatal chasms into which he might tumble.”

“He marveled at the indifference of the world, the way it kept on, despite everything.”

“Maybe he was dead and this island was purgatory from which he could only watch the souls of the more deserving go shuttling past to their various Edens. What is death, after all, but a cessation of involvement with the world, a departure from those you love, and those who love you?”

“Who had he been? A failed father, a runaway husband. A son. A packet of unopened letters. He was dead; he was dead.”

“How few days are left in the lives of anyone. How few hours.”

“What use are memories when memories can do little more than fade?”

“Behind her leg a shy little girl - Grace - smiling up. "Dad?" It was a kind hope. But his dreams spoke to none of that: when he slept he dreamt of darkness, or of people he did not recognize, or of water closing slowly, almost gratefully, over his head.”

“Am I following a path already laid out for me, or am I making it myself?”

“all I feel sure of are questions.”

“You lose sleep, you lose your appetite, but eventually you fall asleep and eventually you eat - you may hate yourself for it, but the body's demands are incontrovertible. He had always felt guilty about that, that he went on living, eating tomato sandwiches, going to Iditarod Days with his father, making snowballs, when his mother could not.”

“Our shadows are our histories. We drag them everywhere.”

“Maybe the idea was that he could write so many letters, deliver so many envelopes back to Sandy, eventually he'd have sent all of himself, and could exist more there than he did here.”

“These were the beginnings of a new existence; Winkler could feel it gestating.”

“silent desperation of everything they never said - gaps and absences in every conversation, the past circumscribing the present, the future hemming in the past.”

“He would be relegated to a post best left fastened and buried.”

“Here was the worst curse: he managed to force the dream from his conscious mind often enough that when it returned to him (opening the pantry door, say, recalling the sweep of floodwater), the experience of it became fresh and bleeding once more.”

“The future waited for him to keep his appointment.”

“How much easier it would have been if he and Sandy could have fought: a skirmish in the night, some harsh words, some measure of the truth actually spoken aloud.”

“He could not look at his daughter without feeling his heart turn over.”

“He checked the barometer he'd nailed to the family room wall: the pressure was rising.”

“but it was also something in Sandy herself, an unwillingness to allow anything more to upset the realm of her understanding.”

“He thought he might say more, but something in her face had closed off, and the opportunity passed.”

“the dreams had ceased coming, as they often did, retreating somewhere else for years, until another event of sufficient significance neared, and the patterns of circumstance dragged them to the surface again.”

“Any moment, it seemed, something could tear the sky and whatever was on the other sides would push through.”

“the whisper of space being compressed.”

“Every small, concurrent event had slowed down and assumed an excruciating clarity.”

“Water was a wild, capricious substance: nothing solid, nothing permanent, nothing as it appeared.”

“Every thirty-one hundred years a volume of water equivalent to all the oceans passed through the atmosphere.”

“For Winkler each hour was another hour between Cleveland and Anchorage, between who they were becoming and who they had been.”

“This, perhaps, is how lives are measured, a series of abandonments that we hope beyond reason will eventually be reconciled.”

“Fifteen and a half years as incontestable, a continent he'd never visit, a staircase he'd never climb.”