Anthony Doerr knows how to tug at the heartstrings. His 2015 Pulitzer Prize winning fiction novel, "All the Light We Cannot See," is a masterfully woven story that unites two unlikely characters during the Second World War. It's a novel that whose life won't soon leave you with each carefully crafted line and haunting plot line. Read it for the poetry, for the worlds that lie within each word and phrase. And read it again. And again. Whether you're an English, Writing or Literature major, book head, or linguist enthusiast, this book appeals to all with its poignant characters, their circumstances, and the ways in which words propel it all. While the entire book could arguably be listed below, here are 12 of the many lovely lines.
12. The moon sets and the eastern sky lightens, the hem of night pulling away, taking stars with it one by one until only two are left.
11. 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.
10. There are none so distant that fate cannot bring them together.
9. When the wind is blowing, which it almost always is, with the walls groaning and the shutters banging, the rooms overloaded and the staircase wound tightly up through its center, the house seems the material equivalent of her uncle’s inner being: apprehensive, isolated, but full of cobwebby wonders.
8. It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.
7. 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.
6. The way her fingers flutter through the space around her. Each a thing he hopes never to forget.
5. Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world. We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs.
4. I have been feeling very clearheaded lately and what I want to write about today is the sea... 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.
3. But the moonlight stays unmoved by the wind, passing through clouds, through air, in what seems to Werner like impossibly slow, imperturbable rays. They hang across the buckling grass.
Why doesn’t the wind move the light?
2. Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.
1. That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.
There is eternity in the novel's connections, which creates a deep and resonant connection within the heart. Read it, read it, read it!
