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.

What you already have is better than what you so desperately seek.”

The goddess tells the lonely sailor not to be afraid, that it is better to be brave in all things,

Whenever the world becomes too loud, too clamorous, too sharp at the edges, whenever he feels that the roar is creeping too close, he shuts his eyes, clamps the muffs over his ears, and dreams himself into the clearing in the woods. Five hundred Douglas firs sway; NeedleMen parachute through the air; the dead ponderosa stands bone-white beneath the stars. There is magic in this place. You just have to sit and breathe and wait.

“The things that look fixed in the world, child—mountains, wealth, empires—their permanence is only an illusion. We believe they will last, but that is only because of the brevity of our own lives.

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

Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.

Why is it so hard to transcend the identities assigned to us when we were young?

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

he feels fully awake, as though the curtains have been ripped off the windows of his mind: what he wants to do is here, right in front of him.

By age seventeen he’d convinced himself that every human he saw was a parasite, captive to the dictates of consumption. 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.”

she comes to see that the little ravine beneath the broad-shouldered mountain is not as foreboding and steep and barbaric as it first seemed—that indeed in every season, at some unexpected moment, it will reveal a beauty that makes her eyes water and her heart thump in her chest, and she comes to believe that perhaps she has indeed journeyed to that better place she always imagined might lie beyond the city walls.

Forgetting, he is learning, is how the world heals itself.