“We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.”
“It’s embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.”
“Every outcome has its cause, and every predicament has its solution.”
“Don’t you want to be alive before you die?”
“So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?”
“All your life you wait, and then it finally comes, and are you ready?”
“A real diamond is never perfect.”
“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.”
“Why else do any of this if not to become who we want to be?”
“Some people are weak in some ways, sir. Others in other ways.”
“Live faithfully, fight bravely, and die laughing.”
“Some griefs can never be put right.”
“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.”
“Sometimes the eye of a hurricane is the safest place to be.”
“Doing nothing is as good as collaborating.”
I am only alive because I have not yet died.”
“Is she happy? For portions of every day, she is happy.”
“See obstacles as opportunities, Reinhold. See obstacles as inspirations.”
“Every rumor carries a seed of truth,”
“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.”
“How do you ever know for certain that you are doing the right thing?”
“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.”
“Your problem, Werner,” says Frederick, “is that you still believe you own your life.”
“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.”
“Stones are just stones and rain is just rain and misfortune is just bad luck.”
“That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much. Only the strongest people can turn away from feelings like that.”
“...the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.”
“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?”
“She walks like a ballerina in dance slippers, her feet as articulate as hands, a little vessel of grace moving out into the fog.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Memories cartwheel out of her head & tumble across the floor.”
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.
"What luck that we came to this little town of Saint Malo, eh?"
All the Light We cannot See quotes about blindness
“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?”
“Do you think, Madame, that in heaven we will really get to see God face-to-face?” “We might.” “What if you’re blind?” “I’d expect that if God wants us to see something, we’ll see it.”
“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.”
“What is blindness? Where there should be a wall, her hands find nothing. Where there should be nothing, a table leg gouges her shin. Cars growl in the streets; leaves whisper in the sky; blood rustles through her inner ears. In the stairwell, in the kitchen, even beside her bed, grown-up voices speak of despair.”
All the Light We cannot See quotes about war
“Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.”
“What the war did to dreamers.”
“War is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity: chocolate or bullets or parachute silk.”
“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.”
“Could he, by some miracle, keep this going? Could they hide here until the war ends? Until the armies finish marching back and forth above their heads, until all they have to so is push open the door and shift some stones aside and the house has become a ruin beside the sea? Until he can hold her fingers in his palms and lead her out into the sunshine? He would walk anywhere to make it happen, bear anything; in a year or three years or ten, France and Germany would not mean what they meant now; they could leave the house and walk to a tourists' restaurant and order simple meal together and eat it in silence, the comfortable kind of silence lovers are supposed to share.”
“The war that killed your grandfather killed sixteen million others. One and a half million French boys alone, most of them younger than I was. Two million on the German side. March the dead in a single-file line, and for eleven days and eleven nights, they’d walk past our door.”
“It was not,' said Jutta, reaching the limits of her French, 'very easy to be good then.”
“Out here the prisoners see the shells smash into the city before they hear them. During the last war, Etienne knew artillerymen who could peer through field glasses and discern their shells’ damage by the colors thrown skyward. Gray was stone. Brown was soil. Pink was flesh.”
All the Light We cannot See quotes about radio
“Open your eyes, the Frenchman on the radio used to say, and see what you can with them before they close forever.”
“Radio: it ties a million ears to a single mouth. Out of loudspeakers all around Zollverein, the staccato voice of the Reich grows like some imperturbable tree; its subjects lean toward its branches as if towards the lips of God. And when God stops whispering, they become desperate for someone who can put things right.”
“I am hearing you. On radio. Is why I come.”