Anthony Doerr

The very life of any creature is a quick-fading spark in fathomless darkness.

That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much. Only the strongest people can turn away from feelings like that.

Rome is a broken mirror, the falling straps of a dress, a puzzle of astonishing complexity. It is an iceberg floating below our terrace, all its ballasts hidden beneath the surface.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience__uying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello__ecome new all over again.

Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitary

Memory builds itself without any clean or objective logic: a dot here, another dot here, and plenty of dark spaces in between. What we know is always evolving, always subdividing. Remember a memory often enough and you can create a new memory, the memory of remembering.

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.

She has no memories of her mother but imagines her as white, a soundless brilliance. Her father radiates a thousand colors, opal, strawberry red, deep russet, wild green; a smell like oil and metal, the feel of a lock tumbler sliding home, the sound of his key rings chiming as he walks.

The moonlight shines and billows; the broken clouds scud above the trees. Leaves fly everywhere. But the moonlight stays unmoved by the wind, passing through clouds, through air, in what seems to Werner like impossibly slow imperturbable rays. They hang across the buckling grass. Why doesn__ the wind move the light?

Don't you ever get tired of believing, Madame? Don't you ever want proof?

Up and down the lanes, the last unevacuated townspeople wake, groan, sigh. Spinsters, prostitutes, men over sixty. Procrastinators, collaborators, disbelievers, drunks. Nuns of every order. The poor. The stubborn. The blind.

Did time move forward, through people, or did people move through it, like clouds across the sky?

A girl got kicked out of the swimming hole today. Inge Hachmann. They said they wouldn__ let us swim with a half-breed. Unsanitary. A half-breed, Werner. Aren__ we half-breeds too? Aren__ we half our mother, half our father?

You must never stop believing. That__ the most important thing.

And one cold Tuesday in December, when Marie-Laure has been blind for over a year, her father walks her up rue Cuvier to the edge of the Jardin des Plantes."Here, ma chérie, is the path we take every morning. Through the cedars up ahead is the Grand Gallery.""I know, Papa."He picks her up and spins her around three times. "Now," he says, "you're going to take us home."Her mouth drops open."I want you to think of the model, Marie.""But I can't possibly!""I'm one step behind you. I won't let anything happen. You have your cane. You know where you are.""I do not!""You do."Exasperation. She cannot even say if the gardens are ahead or behind."Calm yourself, Marie. One centimeter at a time.""I'm far, Papa. Six blocks, at least.""Six blocks is exactly right. Use logic. Which way should we go first?"The world pivots and rumbles. Crows shout, brakes hiss, someone to her left bangs something metal with what might be a hammer. She shuffles forward until the tip of her cane floats in space. The edge of a curb? A pond, a staircase, a cliff? She turns ninety degrees. Three steps forward. Now her cane finds the base of a wall. "Papa?""I'm here."Six paces seven paces eight. A roar of noise - an exterminator just leaving a house, pump bellowing - overtakes them. Twelve paces farther on, the bell tied around the handle of a shop door rings, and two women came out, jostling her as they pass.Marie-Laure drops her cane; she begins to cry. Her father lifts her, holds her to his narrow chest."It's so big," she whispers."You can do this, Marie."She cannot.

He sweeps her hair back from her ears; he swings her above his head. He says she is his émerveillement. He says he will never leave her, not in a million years.

Winkler's breath plumed up onto his glasses. The entire valley was enveloped in a huge, illuminated stillness. Above him the clouds had pulled away and the sky burned with stars. The meadow smoldered with light, and the spruce had become illuminated kingdoms, snow sifting from branch to branch. He thought: This has been here every winter all my life.

You know the greatest lesson of history? It's that history is whatever the victors say it is...Whoever wins, that's who decides the history.