The Shell Collector Quotes

“He wants to tell her that when things vanish they become something else, in death we rise again in the blades of grass, the splitting bodies of seeds.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector

“He wants to tell her what he has learned about the miracles of light, the way a day's light fluxes in tides: pale and gleaming at dawn, the glare of noon, the gold of evening, the promise of twilight -- every second of every day has its own magic. He wants to tell her that when things vanish they become something else, in death we rise again in the blades of grass, the splitting bodies of seeds.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector

“This was a life, this was how people chose to live? Somewhere inside she could feel winds dying, the gales of her youth stifled. She was learning that in her life everything— health, happiness, even love—was subject to the landscape; the weathers of the world were inseparable from the weathers of her soul.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector

“Ignorance was, in the end, and in so many ways, a privilege: to find a shell, to feel it, to understand only on some unspeakable level why it bothered to be so lovely. What joy he found in that, what utter mystery.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector

“Maybe living was no more than getting swept over a riverbed and eventually out to sea, no choices to make, only the vast, formless ocean ahead, the frothing waves, the lightless tomb of its depths.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector

“At the fairgrounds we saw them in the parking lot inhaling the effluvium of carnival, the smells of fried dough, caramel and cinnamon, the flap-flapping of tents, a carousel plinking out music-box songs, voluptuous sounds bouncing down tent ropes and along the trampled dust of the midway. Wind-curled handbills staple-gunned to telephone poles, the hum of gas-powered generators and the gyro truck, the lemonade truck, pretzels and popcorn, baked potatoes, the American flag, the rumblings of rides and the disconnected screams of riders -- all of it shimmered before them like a mirage, something not quite real.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector

“That winter arrived immediately, all at once -- you could watch it come. Twin curtains of white appeared in the north, white all the way to the sky, driving south like the end of all things. They drove the wind before them and it ran like wolves, like floodwater through a cracked dyke. Cattle galloped the fencelines, bawling. Trees toppled; a barn roof tumbled over the highway. The river changed directions. The wind flung thrushes screaming into the gorge and impaled them on the thorns in grotesque attitudes.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector

“A moment like this--the four of them around the table under the sad, dusty kitchen lamp--could never accommodate all the things she had to say.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector

“The silence of Harpswell rises up in her ear like a wave and breaks into a rainbow of tiny sounds: an owl calling, the faint sound of laughter at the bonfire, the pines creaking, cicadas screeching, resting, screeching.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector

“Beneath his feet the snail kept on, feeling its way forward, dragging the house of its shell, fitting its body to the sand, to the private unlit horizons that whorled all around it.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector

“Ignorance was, in the end, and in so many ways, a privilege: to find a shell, to feel it, to understand only on some unspeakable level why it bothered to be so lovely. What joy he found in that, what utter mystery.
Every six hours the tides plowed shelves of beauty onto the beaches of the world, and here he was, able to walk out into it, thrust his hands into it, spin a piece of it between his fingers. To gather up seashells--each one an amazement--to know their names, to drop them into a bucket: this was what filled his life, what overfilled it.
Some mornings, moving through the lagoon, Tumaini splashing comfortably ahead, he felt a nearly irresistible urge to bow down.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector

“Every second of every day has its own magic. - Pg. 163-4”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector

“Life can turn out a million ways. - Pg. 82”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector

“But he didn’t have language for what he really wanted to say; he couldn’t explain how her wildness that day, on the road, had thrilled him as much as it terrified him.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector

“She’d been naked in her pool, floating on her back, when she realized that her life—two kids, a three-story Tudor, an Audi wagon—was not what she wanted.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector

“The wind lifts strands of her hair and sets them back down.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector: Stories

“This is indeed a full world, Dorotea. It overspills.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector: Stories

“I’m still learning it. I suppose we’re all still learning. You learn and learn and then you die and you haven’t learned half of it.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector: Stories

“She was learning that in her life everything - health, happiness, even love - was subject to the landscape; the weathers of the world were inseparable from the weathers of her soul.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector

“Ignorance was, in the end, and in so many ways, a privilege.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector

“And then today the doctor tells us of this American who was cured of the same disease by a snail. Such a simple cure. Elegant, would you not say? A snail that accomplishes what laboratory capsules cannot. Allah, we reason, must be involved in something so elegant. So you see.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector: Stories

“All those moments, captured and doubled onto film, frozen, her own museum of natural history unfolding in front of her.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector

“What if he died here, in this forest, alone? What would become of his bones? Would they crumple and fold into the earth, preserved as a riddle for some other species, hacking one day through stone, to solve? He hadn't done enough with his life. He hadn't seen that what he had in common with the world--with the trunks of trees and the marching columns of ants and green shoots corkscrewing up from the mud--was life: the first light that sent every living thing paddling forth into the world every day.
He wouldn't die--he couldn't. He was, only now, remembering how to live. Something in him wanted to sing out, wanted to shout: I'm lost completely, lost utterly. The shingling, coarse bark of a tree, raindrops plunking on the leaves, the sound of a toad moaning a love song somewhere nearby: all of it seemed terribly beautiful to him.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector

“The only way to find something, she said, is to lose it first.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector

“What a thing, half bird, half lizard, part one thing, part another, trapped forever between more perfect states.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector

“These photos remind you that each moment is here, then gone forever, that no two skies are ever the same.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector

“How to render three dimensions in two, the world in planar spaces. It's the central challenge for every artist, Naima.
Naima stepped back, reexamined her photo. Artist? she thought. An artist?”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector

“It was rapture, the oldest feeling, a sensation like rising from the thick canopy of forest and turning, looking out over the treetops, seeing the world again, for the first time.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector

“--she gazed at places but could not enter them, witnessed beauty but could not experience it. It was as though she had been excised neatly out of each moment. The world had become like an exhibit at Ward's museum: pretty and nostalgic and watered down, something old and sealed off you weren't allowed to touch.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector

“But when she imagined college she thought of her dreary days in the schoolhouse in Lushoto, the heat of classrooms, the impatience of mathematics, bland two-dimensional maps pinned to walls. Green for land, blue for water, stars for capital cities. Schoolmasters obsessed with naming things that had existed unnamed for a million years.”
― Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector