Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

"Into the stillness come the voices of his masters, echoing from one side of his head while memory speaks from the other. Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever."


"This, she realizes, is the basis of his fear, all fear. That a light you are powerless to stop will turn on you and usher a bullet to its mark."


"For Werner, doubts turn up regularly. Racial purity, political purity—Bastian speaks to a horror of any sort of corruption, and yet, 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. Taking things from it, stuffing things into it. Each bite of food, each particle of light entering the eye—the body can never be pure. But this is what the commandant insists upon, why the Reich measures their noses, clocks their hair color. The entropy of a closed system never decreases."


"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."


"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?"


"'Your problem, Werner,' says Frederick, 'is that you still believe you own your life.'"


"The very life of any creature is a quick-fading spark in fathomless darkness."


"Don’t you want to be alive before you die?"

  --  Excerpts from  All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr