About Grace Quotes

“In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“Our shadows are our histories. We drag them everywhere.”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“Hope was a sunrise, a friend in the alley, a whisper in an empty corridor.”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“You ever hope for something so much? So much you can't sleep, so much your skull hurts? But the thing is, you don't even know if the thing you're wishing for is possible? You don't even know if it could happen? And it's all out of your control?”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“The stars were so many and so white they looked like chips of ice, hammered through the fabric of the sky.”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“What use are memories when memories can do little more than fade?”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“He marveled at the indifference of the world, the way it kept on, despite everything.”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“This, perhaps, is how lives are measured, a series of abandonments that we hope beyond reason will eventually be reconciled.”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“To be in love was to be dazed twenty times a morning: by the latticework of frost on his windshield; by a feather loosed from his pillow; by a soft, pink rim of light over the hills.”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“Answers seemed to float through the space around him. It was about love. It was about getting handed at conception a gift that sets you apart from everyone and you spend your whole life drifting through the margins of time, not understanding hours like everyone else seems to: glancing at wristwatches, checking timetables - you hardly know what it is people are trying to accomplish when they go through their days: morning, noon, evening, night. Wake up and sleep and wake up. This was about family, how blood superseded death; it was about trying your hardest, it was about snow.”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“Am I following a path already laid out for me, or am I making it myself?”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“Every second a million petitions wing past the ear of God. Let it be door number two. Get Janet through this. Make Mom fall in love again, make the pain go away, make this key fit. If I fish this cove, plant this field, step into this darkness, give me the strength to see it through. Help my marriage, my sister, me. What will this fund be worth in thirteen days? In thirteen years? Will I be around in thirteen years? And the most unanswerable of unanswerables: Don't let me die. And: What will happen afterward? Chandeliers and choirs? Flocks of souls like starlings harrying across the sky? Eternity; life again as bacteria, or as sunflowers, or as a leatherback turtle; suffocating blackness; cessation of all cellular function.”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“But have heart. Hope is something that can be very dangerous but without it life would be horribly dry. Impossible, even. Take it from me.”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“To consider water on any scale was to confront a boundless repetition of small events. There were the tiny wonders: rain drops, snow crystals, grains of frost aligned on a blade of grass; and there were the wonders so immense it seemed impossible to get his mind around them: global wind, oceanic currents, storms that broke like waves over whole mountain ranges. p 46”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“it was as if these memories had been hibernating in him, not dead but merely dormant, weathering out, and now they stumbled out of their thousand dens.”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“Maybe he was dead and this island was purgatory from which he could only watch the souls of the more deserving go shuttling past to their various Edens. What is death, after all, but a cessation of involvement with the world, a departure from those you love, and those who love you?”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“Nothing that could fit on this page, or a hundred of these pages, would possibly accommodate all the things I should say to you, all the things you deserve to hear.”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“all I feel sure of are questions.”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“It is not so much the science of snow for me, anymore. I’d rather just look at it. The light, the way it absorbs sound. The way we feel as if the more that falls, the more we are forgiven.”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“Maybe the idea was that he could write so many letters, deliver so many envelopes back to Sandy, eventually he'd have sent all of himself, and could exist more there than he did here.”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“But what was family? Surely more than genes, eye color, flesh. Family was story: truth and struggle and retribution. Family was time. If he had learned anything it was the family was not so much what you were given as what you were able to maintain.”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“Did dreams, he wondered, when they arrived, make a sound? The smallest kind, like the noise of an embryo being conceived, or a snowflake touching down?”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“he moved neither forward nor backward in time, but merely endured variations of the same day over and over. Maybe he was the one trapped underwater, under a Plexiglas floor, while the world moved on, men and women checking in and out of rooms, lugging overstuffed suitcases, the soles of their shoes passing lightly above him.”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“Behind her leg a shy little girl - Grace - smiling up. "Dad?" It was a kind hope. But his dreams spoke to none of that: when he slept he dreamt of darkness, or of people he did not recognize, or of water closing slowly, almost gratefully, over his head.”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“He could see tiny particles of dust drifting in the air between her ankles, each fleck tumbling individually in and out of the sunlight, and there was something intensely familiar in their arrangement.”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“In the infinite permutations of an ice crystal, everything repeats itself, but, really, from another point of view, nothing repeats itself. The arms go out, forming dendrites, sectored plates, the same angle every time, but the final product – because of wind, because of molecular vibration, because of rate of growth and temperature – is never the same.”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“Studying ice crystals as a graduate student, he eventually found the basic design (equilateral, equiangled hexagon) so icily repeated, so unerringly conforming, that he couldn't help but shudder: Beneath the splendor--the filigreed blossoms, the microscopic stars--was a ghastly inevitability; crystals could not escape their embedded blueprints any more than humans could. Everything hewed to a rigidity of pattern, the certainty of death.”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“She was crying now, quietly, inhaling so vehemently it was as if she were trying to suck the tears back into her eyes.”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“His heart was a catapult in his chest.”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace

“Does it matter? In memory, in story, in the end, we can remake our lives any way we need. To be surprised, truly and utterly surprised by what came into your life - this, Winkler was learning, was the true gift.”
― Anthony Doerr, About Grace