Anthony Doerr

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

“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 sam...”

“I am only alive because I have not yet died.”

“One night he sits up. In cots around him are a few dozen sick or wounded. A warm September wind pours across the countryside and sets the walls of the tent rippling. Werner’s head swivels li...”

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

“Life is wonderful and strange...and it’s also absolutely mundane and tiresome. It’s hilarious and it’s deadening. It’s a big, screwed-up morass of beauty and change and fear and all our live...”

“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 wa...”

“Without always meaning to, I write really long short stories, 60-pagers, 90-pagers, pieces of fiction that are too long for all but the bravest magazines to print, and too short for all but...”

“Pretty much every night of their lives, my 8-year-old sons have absorbed themselves entirely in books. As toddlers, they pointed out pictures, made conjectures; lately, we find them in their...”

“Supposedly, some writers work in rowdy coffee shops or compose whole novels to Megadeth, but when I write, I wear a pair of chainsaw operator's earmuffs.”

“We Americans are churning through fresh water at an alarming and unsustainable rate.”

“If our biological imperative is to pass our genes to the next generation, our moral imperative has to be to try, before we become corpses, to leave them a planet they can survive on.”

“Lewis Robinson's first novel, 'Water Dogs,' is stuffed with snow. Open practically any page of this book, and crystals will shake out.”

“'Never do the dishes without music,' my brother Mark once advised me - the same brother who once ate a spoonful of refrigerated dog food to escape his turn at the kitchen sink. And really, i...”

“Maybe scarcity isn't always a bad thing. Maybe scarcity is something to seek out, to fabricate for oneself.”

“Fiction writing is just an excuse to go discover interesting things.”

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

“I grew up in Cleveland, so my heart got attached at a young age to the freight train of sadness that is Cleveland sports.”

“We live through life, but we live through art, too. And in art, as in life, nothing is generalized. No one thing is a copy of the next. Everything is individual.”