All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr

It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio. —Joseph Goebbels

There is the humility of being a father to someone so powerful, as if he were only a narrow conduit for another, greater thing.

Frederick’s dreaminess, his otherness—it’s on him like a scent, and everyone can smell it.

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

And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.