Cloud Cuckoo Land

by Anthony Doerr

“It’s like we’re about to walk into the book.”

Each sign signifies a sound, and to link sounds is to form words, and to link words is to construct worlds. Weary

“Repository,” he finally says, “you know this word? A resting place. A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.”

“But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.”

glass city, far to the north, where everyone speaks in whispers so they don’t break anything;

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.

But as a bee hurries to and fro, visiting every flower without pause, so my restlessness …

It takes children years to learn the difference between fantasy and reality. Some longer than others.

and for a heartbeat he wonders if the ball will travel forever, beyond the horizon, smashing through tree after tree, wall after wall, until it flies off the edge of the world.

an invisible plow rakes a great furrow in the earth, and the report of the detonation reverberates in the marrow of his bones. The cheer that comes up from the gathered crowd is less a cheer of triumph than of stupefaction.

“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. From the perspective of God, cities like this come and go like anthills.

books—some as small as her hand, some as big as the mattress on which she sleeps—are flying, lifting off shelves, returning to them, some flitting like songbirds, some lumbering along like big ungainly storks.

“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.”

I was a fish inside a sea inside a bigger fish inside a bigger sea, and I wondered if the world itself swam also inside the belly of a much greater fish, all of us fish inside fish inside fish, and then, tired of so much wondering, I shut my scaly eyes and slept

Why can’t healing happen as quickly as wounding?

Over the lake the eyes of Trustyfriend open, two yellow moons.

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?

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

All my life, he thinks, my best companions cannot speak the same language as me.

In a life you accumulate so many memories, your brain constantly winnowing through them, weighing consequence, burying pain, but somehow by the time you’re this age you still end up dragging a monumental sack of memories behind you, a burden as heavy as a continent, and eventually it becomes time to take them out of the world.

every human he saw was a parasite, captive to the dictates of consumption.

be a part of the problem is to be human.

“The world as it is is enough.”

Time: the most violent war engine of all.

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

Stranger, whoever you are, open this to find what will amaze you,