Cloud Cuckoo Land

by Anthony Doerr

Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes.

“You remembers, boy,” he says, “there is no bad weathers, only bad clothes.”

health insurance, ha ha, just kidding, she’ll never afford health insurance.

We still have our yard. We still have each other. Right?” He closes his eyes and sees Trustyfriend cruise over a wasteland of endless parking lots, nowhere to hunt, nowhere to land, nowhere to sleep.

“For as long as we have been a species, whether with medicine or technology, by gathering power, by embarking on journeys, or by telling stories, we humans have tried to defeat death. None of us ever has.”

reach Beta Oph2, dear, and that is a painful truth. But in time you will come to believe that there is nobility in being a part of an enterprise that will outlast you.”

“Boil the words you already know down to their bones,” Rex says, “and usually you find the ancients sitting there at the bottom of the pot, staring back up.”

“That’s what the gods do,” he says, “they spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come.”

Life usually seeks to cooperate, not fight.”

“Some stories,” she says, “can be both false and true at the same time.”

The chronometers that run inside every human cell that tell us it’s time to get drowsy, to make a baby, to grow old—all these clocks, Father said, can be altered by speed, software, or circumstance.

He said that plants carried wisdom humans would never be around long enough to understand.

a story is a way of stretching time.

“He suffers so much,” murmurs Maria. “But he keeps on.”

Time is a circle, Licinius used to say, and every circle eventually must close.

“He never stops believing,” whispers Maria. “Even when he is so tired.”

A way for a small thing to destroy a much larger thing.

But what is it that they have destroyed?

“It will be wonderful,” he says, though he sounds unconvinced. “We will strike terror into their hearts.”

he wonders at the mystery of how one god can manage the thoughts and terrors of so many.

How do men convince themselves that others must die so they might live?

the faces of the women take on ancient suffering that is almost sublime: as though they suspected all along that things would end like this and are resigned to it.

Strange how suffering can look beautiful if you get far enough away.

“Why stay here when I could be there?”

That’s what the gods do, they spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come. Not now, gods. Not tonight. Let these children stay children for another night.

An angel in one child, Widow Theodora used to say, and a wolf in the other.

with a tower of cakes balanced on his shell. Though it will seem simple at first, it’s actually quite complicated.

No, no, it will seem complicated at first, but it’s actually quite simple.

To select one word was to commit to a single path when the maze contains thousands.

Of all the mad things we humans do, Rex once told him, there might be nothing more humbling, or more noble, than trying to translate the dead languages. We don’t know how the old Greeks sounded when they spoke; we can scarcely map their words onto ours; from the very start, we’re doomed to fail. But in the attempt, Rex said, in trying to drag something across the river from the murk of history into our time, into our language: that was, he said, the best kind of fool’s errand.

‘Hope is the pillar that holds up the world.’ ”

But what’s so beautiful about a fool, he says, is that a fool never knows when to give up.

WHAT YOU ALREADY HAVE IS BETTER THAN WHAT YOU SO DESPERATELY SEEK

“In much wisdom is much sorrow, and in ignorance is much wisdom.”

At one time you were a thoughtful and sensitive boy and it is my hope that you have become a thoughtful and sensitive man.

he’s being allowed to glimpse an older and undiluted world, when every barn swallow, every sunset, every storm, pulsed with meaning.

But as he reconstructs Zeno’s translation, he realizes that the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.

In a child’s cursive, beneath the crossed-out lines, Aethon’s new line is handwritten in the margin, “The world as it is is enough.”