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Cloud Cuckoo Land QUOTES

Cloud Cuckoo Land QUOTES

1 " How does life get to be like this? Where she wears her sister's castoff underlinen and a thrice-patched dress while men like Kalaphates go about in silk and velvet with servants trotting behind? While foreigners like these have basins of milk and courtyards of geese and a different coat for every feast day? She feels a scream building inside her, a shriek to shatter glass. "

― Anthony Doerr , Cloud Cuckoo Land

2 " As she [Anna] sweeps the workroom floor, as she lugs another roll of fabric or another bucket of charcoal, as she sits in the workroom beside Maria, fingers numb, breath pluming over the silk, she practices her letters on the thousand blank pages of her mind. Each sign signifies a sound, and to link sounds is to form words, and to link words is to construct worlds. "

― Anthony Doerr , Cloud Cuckoo Land

3 " 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. "

― Anthony Doerr , Cloud Cuckoo Land

4 " 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. "

― Anthony Doerr , Cloud Cuckoo Land

5 " 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. "

― Anthony Doerr , Cloud Cuckoo Land

6 " Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered. "

― Anthony Doerr , Cloud Cuckoo Land

7 " WHAT YOU ALREADY HAVE IS BETTER THAN WHAT YOU SO DESPERATELY SEEK "

― Anthony Doerr , Cloud Cuckoo Land

8 " we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human "

― Anthony Doerr , Cloud Cuckoo Land

9 " Hope is the pillar that holds up the world. "

― Anthony Doerr , Cloud Cuckoo Land

10 " 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. "

― Anthony Doerr , Cloud Cuckoo Land

11 " strange how suffering can look beautiful if you get far enough away "

― Anthony Doerr , Cloud Cuckoo Land

12 " what's so beautiful about a fool is that a fool never knows when to give up "

― Anthony Doerr , Cloud Cuckoo Land

13 " 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.” His eyes open very widely then, as though he peers into a great darkness. “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. "

― Anthony Doerr , Cloud Cuckoo Land

14 " Why is it so hard to transcend the identities assigned to us when we were young? "

― Anthony Doerr , Cloud Cuckoo Land

15 " Why can't healing happen as quickly as wounding? "

― Anthony Doerr , Cloud Cuckoo Land

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

― Anthony Doerr , Cloud Cuckoo Land

17 " He should have risked more. It has taken him his whole life to accept himself, and he is surprised to understand that now that he can, he does not long for one more year, one more month: eighty-six years has been enough. 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. "

― Anthony Doerr , Cloud Cuckoo Land

18 " And as he looked, turning the leaf over and back, Aethon saw that the cities on both sides of the page, the dark ones and the bright ones, were one and the same, that there is no peace without war, no life without death, and he was afraid. "

― Anthony Doerr , Cloud Cuckoo Land

19 " Some stories," she says, "can be both false and true at the same time. "

― Anthony Doerr , Cloud Cuckoo Land

20 " Fear of the thing,” Maher murmurs, more to himself than to Omeir, “will be more powerful than the thing itself. "

― Anthony Doerr , Cloud Cuckoo Land