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?
Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.
This, she realizes, is the basis of all fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark.
War is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity: chocolate or bullets or parachute silk.
Posters go up in the market, on tree trunks in the Place Chateaubriand. Voluntary surrender of firearms. Anyone who does not cooperate will be shot.
They can march for days without eating. They impregnate every schoolgirl they meet.
Stick-thin, alabaster-pale Etienne LeBlanc runs down the rue de Dinan with Madame Ruelle, the baker’s wife, on his heels: the least-robust rescue ever assembled.
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.
You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is…Whoever wins, that’s who decides the history.
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.
You must never stop believing. That’s the most important thing.
A girl got kicked out of the swimming hole today. Inge Hachmann. They said they wouldn’t let us swim with a half-breed. Unsanitary. A half-breed, Werner. Aren’t we half-breeds too? Aren’t we half our mother, half our father?
Did time move forward, through people, or did people move through it, like clouds across the sky?
Up and down the lanes, the last unevacuated townspeople wake, groan, sigh. Spinsters, prostitutes, men over sixty. Procrastinators, collaborators, disbelievers, drunks. Nuns of every order. The poor. The stubborn. The blind.
Don’t you ever get tired of believing, Madame? Don’t you ever want proof?
Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitary
Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.
Rome is a broken mirror, the falling straps of a dress, a puzzle of astonishing complexity. It is an iceberg floating below our terrace, all its ballasts hidden beneath the surface.
That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much. Only the strongest people can turn away from feelings like that.
The very life of any creature is a quick-fading spark in fathomless darkness.
It’s embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.
Don’t tell me how to grieve. Don’t tell me ghosts fade away eventually, like they do in movies, waving goodbye with see-through hands. Lots of things fade away but ghosts like these don’t, heartbreak like these doesn’t.
The stars were so many and so white they looked like chips of ice, hammered through the fabric of the sky.
I’m thankful that everything sweet is sweet because it is finite.
On the rue de la Crosse, the Hotel of Bees becomes almost weightless for a moment, lifted in a spiral of flame, before it begins to rain the pieces back to the earth
How about peaches, dear?” murmurs Madame Manec, and Marie-Laure can hear a can opening, juice slopping into a bowl. Seconds later, she’s eating wedges of wet sunlight.
There are, he assures her, no such things as curses. There is luck, maybe, bad or good. A slight inclination of each day towards success or failure. But no curses.
There are, he assures her, no such things as curses. There is luck, maybe, bad or good. A slight indication of each day toward success or failure. But no curses.
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.