Anthony Doerr

“Between them was fifteen or so feet of frozen space, bounded by his window and hers, but it was as if the windows had liquefied, or else the air had, and his vision skewed and rippled and it was all he could do to put the Newport into gear and ease forward to let the next car in.”

“had felt time settle over itself, imbricate and fix into place the vertigo of future aligning with the present.”

“Somwhere across town she was standing at a sink or walking into a closet, his name stowed somewhere in the pleated neurons of her brain, echoing up one dendrite in a billion: David, David.”

“He could see tiny particles of dust drifting in the air between her ankles, each fleck tumbling individually in and out of the sunlight, and there was something intensely familiar in their arrangement.”

“Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitrary. Winkler was still on an airplane, hurtling north, but he was also pushing farther back, sinking deeper into the overlaps, to the years before he even had a daughter, before he had even dreamed of the woman who would become his wife.”

“March, rain at the windows, and he had to be up at five the next morning. He listened to the click and patter of drops against the panes.”

“(Rome) is a Metropolitan Museum of Art the size of Manhattan, no roof, no display cases, and half a million combustion engines rumbling in the hallways.”

“A travel website says that there are 280 fountains in Rome, but it seems as if there are more:...Remove them and there is no present tense, no circulatory system, nor dreams to balance the waking hours. No Rome.”

“What we eat is a poem.”

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

“Just when we think we have a system, ...the system collapses. Just when we know our way around, we get lost. Just when we think we know what's coming next, everything changes.”

“Every hour, Robert thinks, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new. They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like bread crumbs. The world is remade.”

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

“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.”

“- even in the midst of grief the mind grapples with a hundred impressions: a pain below the heart, an odor on the breeze.”

“The dead are gone and so their power over the living is only temporary. You lose sleep, you lose 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 guilt about that, that he went on living... p 115”

“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”