All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr

From outside comes a light tinkling, fragments of glass, perhaps, falling into the streets. It sounds both beautiful and strange, as though gemstones were raining from the sky.

This, she realizes, is the basis of his fear, all fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark.

“Your problem, Werner,” says Frederick, “is that you still believe you own your life.”

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

It’s as if the city has become a library of books in an unknown language, the houses great shelves of illegible volumes, the lamps all extinguished.

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

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

she feels all of a sudden that she works in a mausoleum, that the departments are systematic graveyards, that all these people—the scientists and warders and guards and visitors—occupy galleries of the dead.