All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr

Walk the paths of logic. Every outcome has its cause, and every predicament has its solution. Every lock its key.

She can almost hear the machinery of her father’s mind churning inside his skull.

he is visited by fears so immense, so multiple, that she can almost feel the terror pulsing inside him. As though some beast breathes all the time at the windowpanes of his mind.

The moon sets and the eastern sky lightens, the hem of night pulling away, taking stars with it one by one until only two are left.

even total darkness is not quite darkness;

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

He never cries out and never asks to leave, and this in particular seems to make the commandant quake with homicidal frustration. Frederick’s dreaminess, his otherness—it’s on him like a scent, and everyone can smell it.

Each story Werner hears contains its own flaws and contradictions, as though the truth is a machine whose gears are not meshing.

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

“I don’t want to make trouble, Madame.” “Isn’t doing nothing a kind of troublemaking?” “Doing nothing is doing nothing.” “Doing nothing is as good as collaborating.”

It’s not a person you wish to fight, Madame, it’s a system. How do you fight a system?” “You try.”

Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.

He never leaves his house, sees no one save Marie-Laure, and yet somehow he has found himself at the nexus of a web of information.

fireflies floated away from them, illuming on and off, always seeming to rise just beyond their reach, as if the earth were smoldering and these were sparks that their footfalls had prodded free.

Silence is the fruit of the occupation; it hangs in branches, seeps from gutters.

So many windows are dark. 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.

the only person in Werner’s life who could see through all that stagecraft was his younger sister. How? How did Jutta understand so much more about how the world worked? While he knew so little?

It seems to Werner that in the space between whatever has happened already and whatever is to come hovers an invisible borderland, the known on one side and the unknown on the other.

But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same?”

most are strangers to one another, and all have seen things they wish to forget.

Even those who have returned, she can tell, have returned different, older than they should be, as though they have been on another planet where years pass more quickly.

She does not want to be one of those middle-aged women who thinks of nothing but her own painful history. Sometimes she looks at the eyes of her older colleagues and wonders what they did when the electricity was out, when there were no candles, when the rain came through the ceiling. What they saw.

It was hard to live through the early 1940s in France and not have the war be the center from which the rest of your life spiraled.

He made such a faint presence. It was like being in the room with a feather.

Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world. We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.