All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr is a novel set during World War II. We meet Marie-Laure, a visually impaired French girl, and Werner, an orphan from Zollverein, Germany, who has become a radio mechanics expert. As the Nazi regime tightens its grip on occupied France, Marie-Laure's father, a locksmith at the Museum of Natural History in Paris, flees with his daughter to the coastal city of Saint-Malo, carrying a precious jewel called the Sea of Flames. Meanwhile, Werner's brilliance earns him a place in a brutal Hitler Youth academy under Von Rumpel, leading to a fateful assignment that converges with Marie-Laure's life in the walled citadel. The novel explores the human capacity for courage, the impact of war on innocence, and the resilience of the human spirit.
This 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece challenges readers to see the "universes in every person." Here are 30+ quotes from All the Light We Cannot See, highlighting the novel's themes of war, love, nature, and the human experience.
The best All the Light We Cannot See quotes about war and survival
"A shell screams over the house. He thinks: I only want to sit here with her for a thousand hours."
"Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world."
"Doing nothing is as good as collaborating."
"I am only alive because I have not yet died."
"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?"
"War is a bazaar where lives are traded like any other commodity: chocolate or bullets or parachute silk."
“You know the greatest lesson of history? It’s that history is whatever the victors say it is."
The best All the Light We Cannot See quotes about love and connection
"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.”
"Radio: it ties a million ears to a single mouth."
“To really touch something, she is learning ... is to love it.”
The best All the Light We Cannot See quotes about nature and the human experience
"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."
"She walks like a ballerina in dance slippers, her feet as articulate as hands, a little vessel of grace moving out into the fog."
"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 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…"
"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."
"Every outcome has its cause, and every predicament has its solution."
“Some people are weak in some ways ... Others in other ways.”
"We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust."
“Sometimes the eye of a hurricane is the safest place to be.”
The best All the Light We Cannot See quotes to make you think
"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?"
"All your life you wait, and then it finally comes, and are you ready?"
"How do you ever know for certain that you are doing the right thing?"
"It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is."
"Memories cartwheel out of her head and tumble across the floor."
"Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever."
"To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness."
“A real diamond is never perfect.”
"Stones are just stones and rain is just rain and misfortune is just bad luck."
