Anthony Doerr Quotes
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We buy a copy of 'Gravity's Rainbow,' say, and we carry our copy home. We open it; we fall into it. And it is here that the word 'copy' fails. Because what I experience when I read 'Gravity's Rainbow,' or 'Beloved,' or 'The Moviegoer,' is not at all a 'copy' of what you experience when you read the same novel.
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For me it was perfect, because it wasn't a very competitive environment, and it was a studio program. They basically send you off, and say, bring us some work, and we'll help you improve it. It really rewarded self-discipline.
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I was reading C.S. Lewis with my mom, and she was pointing out that he was dead, and I'm like, 'What do you mean he's dead?' We were in this world he created, and he was gone from the Earth. Yet in those black marks on a white page, his imagination lived on, his voice lived on. That is so miraculous.
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I feel like it has gone very fast for me, but I feel like it wasn't instantaneous, at all. I was getting a lot of rejections. I just got very lucky and it happened quickly for me. I don't feel like I'm a prodigy or something.
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I read Stephen Crane's 'The Open Boat' when I was 11.
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We live in a culture that venerates scores. We affix numbers to how much fat is in our mochachinos, how quickly our telephones suck information from the air, how much pain we're in. Reading, too, has become a skill to quantifiably assess.
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Sometimes my readers ask me what else they should read, and I recommend Sebald.
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Sometimes, if you wander long enough out-of-doors, you look up and find yourself in a suddenly devastating place: on a glittering slab of granite, say, hanging a thousand feet above a mountain lake.
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You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't.
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I guess you could say I've been writing all my life.
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I've been getting into Nick Drake lately, the folk singer. Sad, gorgeous stuff.
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I never played inside as a kid - even in the rain I'd go out.
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You and I can go on YouTube and learn how to fix a tractor engine or learn Farsi. Groups are using those tools to recruit young people into a climate of hatred.
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The world is so fundamentally interesting that it makes me fall in love with it a dozen times a day.
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'Never do the dishes without music,' my brother Mark once advised me - the same brother who once ate a spoonful of refrigerated dog food to escape his turn at the kitchen sink. And really, it may be the most sensible advice I've been given.
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Science and literature are both ways to ask questions about why we're here.
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My parents would drive us to Florida every spring in this big old, rusy Suburban, and we'd collect stuff on the beach for our aquarium back in Ohio; we had this big saltwater aquarium back in Ohio. Every time we found anything, any mollusk, my mom would bring out the guidebook and quiz us on what it was, so that stuff was built in early.
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I think fiction is important because it has the power to transport a reader into another life.
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Pretty much every night of their lives, my 8-year-old sons have absorbed themselves entirely in books. As toddlers, they pointed out pictures, made conjectures; lately, we find them in their bunk beds embarked upon two-hour comic-reading benders.
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When I was a boy, all the books I owned fit on a single shelf. Now I have several thousand stacked around the house.
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Learned to read, and for a while as a kid, you think books are just leaves on trees. Then suddenly, you think a human being is making that, and maybe you could do that.
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If our biological imperative is to pass our genes to the next generation, our moral imperative has to be to try, before we become corpses, to leave them a planet they can survive on.
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My mom was a high school science teacher for decades. She just never made it feel like we had to choose between the arts and the sciences. We had bookshelves full of novels, and she also had Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold and Carl Sagan.
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For me, the natural world is always telling big stories about humongous scales of time. And I often feel simultaneously terrified and humbled by those scales and in awe, and delighted that I get to be here; that I'm lucky enough, that we are lucky enough to get experience these things for the tiny finger snap of time that we get to be on Earth.