All the Light We Cannot See quotes explore the human capacity to endure.
All the Light We Cannot See follows the lives of two characters—Marie-Laure, a blind French girl, and Werner, a German orphan—during World War II.
Through their story, the novel highlights the immense challenges of living in a war-torn world and the power of resilience and hope. It is written with exquisite detail and masterful prose.
All The Light We Cannot See Quotes With Page Numbers
“To really touch something, she is learning—the bark of a sycamore tree in the gardens; a pinned stag beetle in the Department of Etymology; the exquisitely polished interior of a scallop shell in Dr. Geffard’s workshop—is to love it.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 1, Page 30
“He sweeps her hair back from her ears; he swings her above his head. He says she is his émerveillement. He says he will never leave her, not in a million years.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 1, Page 31
“So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, A broadcast, Part 1, Page 48
“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?”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, A broadcast, Part 1, Page 48
“Stones are just stones and rain is just rain and misfortune is just bad luck.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 1, Pages 51 and 55
“That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much. Only the strongest people can turn away from feelings like that.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, Marie-Laure Leblanc, Part 1, Page 52 (first appearance)
“What do we call visible light? We call it color. But the electromagnetic spectrum runs to zero in one direction and infinity in the other, so really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 1, Page 53
“The sea is everything. It covers seven tenths of the globe . . . The sea is only a receptacle for all the prodigious, supernatural things that exist inside it. It is only movement and love; it is the living infinite.”
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, Part 1, Page 60
“Radio: it ties a million ears to a single mouth.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 1, Page 63
“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.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, Herr Siedler, Part 1, Page 84
All The Light We Cannot See Parts Two and Three Quotes
“Every outcome has its cause, and every predicament has its solution.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 2, Page 111
“Is it right,” Jutta says, “to do something only because everyone else is doing it?”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, Jutta Pfennig, Part 2, Page 133
“His voice is low and soft, a piece of silk you might keep in a drawer and pull out only on rare occasions, just to feel it between your fingers.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 2, Page 134
“This, she realizes, is the basis of his fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 3, Page 160
“How do you ever know for certain that you are doing the right thing?”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 3, Page 189
“Some people are weak in some ways, sir. Others in other ways.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, Frederick, Part 3, Page 193
Parts Four and Five
“Sometimes the eye of a hurricane is the safest place to be.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 4, Page 209
“Your problem, Werner,” says Frederick, “is that you still believe you own your life.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, Frederick, Part 5, Page 223
“Why else do any of this if not to become who we want to be?”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, Werner Pfennig, Part 5, Page 223
“A real diamond is never perfect.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 5, Page 234
“Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 5, Page 264
“Doing nothing is as good as collaborating.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, Madame Manec, Part 5, Page 269
“Don’t you want to be alive before you die?”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, Madame Manec, Part 5, Page 270
“Werner wonders in the dead of night, isn’t life a kind of corruption? A child is born, and the world sets in upon it.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 5, Page 276
“Do you know what happens, Etienne,” says Madame Manec from the other side of the kitchen, “when you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water?” “You will tell us, I am sure.” “It jumps out. But do you know what happens when you put the frog in a pot of cool water and then slowly bring it to a boil? You know what happens then?” Marie-Laure waits. The potatoes steam. Madame Manec says, “The frog cooks.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, Madame Manec, Part 5, Page 285
“If only life were like a Jules Verne novel, thinks Marie-Laure, and you could page ahead when you most needed to, and learn what would happen.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 5, Page 292
All The Light We Cannot See Parts Six and Seven
“A line comes back to Marie-Laure from Jules Verne: 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.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, a line from Jules Verne, Part 7, Page 328
Part Eight
“Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 8, Page 376
“I am only alive because I have not yet died.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, Marie-Laure Leblanc’s thoughts, Part 8, Page 377
“To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 8, Page 390
Part Nine
“To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness. Beneath your world of skies and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air. Marie-Laure can sit in an attic high above the street and hear lilies rustling in marshes two miles away. She hears Americans scurry across farm fields, directing their huge cannons at the smoke of Saint-Malo; she hears families sniffling around hurricane lamps in cellars, crows hopping from pile to pile, flies landing on corpses in ditches; she hears the tamarinds shiver and the jays shriek and the dune grass burn; she feels the great granite fist, sunk deep into the earth’s crust, on which Saint-Malo sits, and the ocean teething at it from all four sides, and the outer islands holding steady against the swirling tides; she hears cows drink from stone troughs and dolphins rise through the green water of the Channel; she hears the bones of dead whales stir five leagues below, their marrow offering a century of food for cities of creatures who will live their whole lives and never once see a photon sent from the sun. She hears her snails in the grotto drag their bodies over the rocks.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 9, Pages 390-91
“I have been feeling very clearheaded lately and what I want to write about today is the sea. It contains so many colors. Silver at dawn, green at noon, dark blue in the evening. Sometimes it looks almost red. Or it will turn the color of old coins. Right now the shadows of clouds are dragging across it, and patches of sunlight are touching down everywhere. White strings of gulls drag over it like beads.
It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, Werner Pfennig, Part 9, Page 405
“She walks like a ballerina in dance slippers, her feet as articulate as hands, a little vessel of grace moving out into the fog.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 9, Page 412
“War…is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity: chocolate or bullets or parachute silk.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 9, Page 421
Part Ten
“What mazes there are in this world. The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father recreated in his models…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.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The Narrator, Part 10, Page 452
“All your life you wait, and then it finally comes, and are you ready?”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 10, Page 465
“We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 10, Page 468
“But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same?”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, Werner Pfennig, Part 10, Page 469
“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?”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, Werner Pfennig, Part 10, Page 469
“The way her fingers flutter through the space around her. Each a thing he hopes never to forget.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 10, Page 469
“A shell screams over the house. He thinks: I only want to sit here with her for a thousand hours.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 10, Page 470
“To men like that, time was a surfeit, a barrel they watched slowly drain. When really, he thinks, it’s a glowing puddle you carry in your hands; you should spend all your energy protecting it. Fighting for it. Working so hard not to spill one single drop.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 10, Page 476
Parts Eleven and Twelve
“It’s embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, Tha narrator, Part 12, Page 503
“What the war did to dreamers.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 12, Page 506
“Memories cartwheel out of her head & tumble across the floor.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 12, Page 506
Part Thirteen
“People walk the paths of the gardens below, and the wind sings anthems in the hedges, and the big old cedars at the entrance to the maze creak. Marie-Laure imagines the electromagnetic waves traveling into and out of Michel’s machine, bending around them, just as Etienne used to describe, except now a thousand times more crisscross the air than when he lived – maybe a million times more. Torrents of text conversations, tides of cell conversations, of televisions programs, of e-mails, vast networks of fiber and wire interlaced above and beneath the city, passing through buildings, arcing between transmitters in Metro tunnels, between antennas atop buildings, from lampposts with cellular transmitters in them, commercials for Carrefour and Evian and prebaked toaster pastries flashing into space and back to earth again, I am going to be late and Maybe we should get reservations? and Pick up avocados and What did he say? and ten thousand I miss yous, fifty thousand I love yous, hate mail and appointment reminders and market updates, jewelry ads, coffee ads, furniture ads flying invisibly over the warrens of Paris, over the battlefields and tombs, over the Ardennes, over the Rhine, over Belgium and Denmark, over the scarred and ever-shifting landscape we call nations. And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.
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.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 13, Pages 528-29
“We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 13, Page 529
“Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 13, Page 529
“…the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 13, Page 529
“And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough?”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 13, Page 529
What is the bravery quote from All the Light We Cannot See?
“Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.”
~Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, The narrator, Part 5, Page 264