All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel set during World War II. At the story's center are two young people: Marie-Laure, a visually impaired girl who lives in Paris with her father, a locksmith at the Museum of Natural History, and Werner, an orphan from Zollverein, Germany, distinguished by his talent for radio mechanics. As the Nazi regime tightens its grip on occupied France, Marie-Laure flees to the coastal city of Saint-Malo with her father, who is secretly carrying a precious jewel called the Sea of Flames. Meanwhile, Werner's brilliance earns him a place in the brutal Hitler Youth Academy under Von Rumpel, leading to a fateful assignment that converges with Marie-Laure's life in the walled citadel.

In his epic work of historical fiction, Doerr challenges readers to see the "universes in every person." Here are 40+ quotes from All the Light We Cannot See to touch your heart and leave you thinking.

On war and its impact

• "War is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity: chocolate or bullets or parachute silk."

• "Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world."

• "War is a thing that is done to you."

• “You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is."

• "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."

• "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."

• "A shell screams over the house. He thinks: I only want to sit here with her for a thousand hours."

• “Sometimes the eye of a hurricane is the safest place to be.”

• "It strikes Werner just then as wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing indifference of the world."

• "Your problem ... is that you still believe you own your life."

• "Doing nothing is as good as collaborating."

On perception and understanding

• "What mazes there are in this world. The branches of trees, the filigree of roots, the matrix of crystals, the streets her father recreated in his models ... None more complicated than the human brain."

• "When I lost my sight ... 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?"

• "How do you ever know for certain that you are doing the right thing?"

• "To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness."

• "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."

• "So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?"

• "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."

• "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."

• "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."

• "Every outcome has its cause, and every predicament has its solution."

• “A real diamond is never perfect.”

• "Stones are just stones and rain is just rain and misfortune is just bad luck."

On human connection and love

• "Radio: it ties a million ears to a single mouth."

• “To really touch something, she is learning ... is to love it.”

• “Some people are weak in some ways ... Others in other ways.”

• "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."

• "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."

• "The way her fingers flutter through the space around her. Each a thing he hopes never to forget."

• “That something so small could be so beautiful. Worth so much. Only the strongest people can turn away from feelings like that.”

• "She walks like a ballerina in dance slippers, her feet as articulate as hands, a little vessel of grace moving out into the fog."

• "Memories cartwheel out of her head and tumble across the floor."

• "It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is."

• "Why else do any of this if not to become who we want to be?"

On time and mortality

• "Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever."

• "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."

• "I am only alive because I have not yet died."

• "If only life were like a Jules Verne novel ... and you could page ahead when you most needed to, and learn what would happen."

• "We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust ... Then the world starts in on us."

• "All your life you wait, and then it finally comes, and are you ready?"

• "Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever."

• "Don't you want to be alive before you die?"

• "We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs."