All the Light We Cannot See

All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr 

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

“When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don't you do the same?” 

“The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?”

“None more complicated than the human brain, Etienne would say, what may be the most complex object in existence; one wet kilogram within which spin universes.”  

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

“You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is. That’s the lesson. Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history. We act in our own self-interest. Of course we do. Name me a person or a nation who does not. The trick is figuring out where your interests are.” 

“A real diamond is never perfect.” 

“Radio: it ties a million ears to a single mouth.” 

“Uncle Etienne says heaven is like a blanket babies cling to.”

“There are none so distant that fate cannot bring them together.” 

“Seventy-six years old,” she whispers, “and I can still feel like this? Like a little girl with stars in my eyes?” 

“And yet she can tell 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.”

“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. Marie-Laure still cannot wear shoes that are too large, or smell a boiled turnip, without experiencing revulsion. Neither can she listen to lists of names. Soccer team rosters, citations at the end of journals, introductions at faculty meetings – always they seem to her some vestige of the prison lists that never contained her father’s name.” 

“Madame? What do I look like?”

“You have many thousands of freckles.”

“Papa used to say they were like stars in heaven. Like apples in a tree.”

"In the dream the Goddess of the Earth told him she’d made the Sea of Flames as a gift for her lover, the God of the Sea, and was sending the jewel to him through the river. But when the river dried up, and the prince plucked it out, the goddess became enraged. She cursed the stone and whoever kept it.” 

“It was not,' said Jutta, reaching the limits of her French, 'very easy to be good then.”