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In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.

Anthony Doerr

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Anthony Doerr
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: October 27
Author Of Novels
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Cleveland
Ohio
Memories
Present
Future
Lives
Transcription
History
Hurries
Stories
Chronology
Past
Defy
Resist

More quotes by Anthony Doerr

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My sister-in-law is a painter, and I'll say, how long did it take you to paint that painting. She'll say, It took me maybe three days, but it took me all my life to get the skills to paint that painting.
Anthony Doerr
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Only Numbers. Pure math. You have to accustom yourself to thinking that way.
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A real diamond is never perfect.
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Things hardly ever work on the first try. We'll make another, a better one.
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I never played inside as a kid - even in the rain I'd go out.
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For me, writing historical fiction is all about finding a balance between reading, traveling, looking, imagining, and dreaming.
Anthony Doerr
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Radio - and perhaps airplanes, and then of course, the atom bomb - was the preeminent technology of the first half of the 20th century. It was how the Third Reich controlled its citizens, spread lies, and disseminated fear.
Anthony Doerr
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I went to Europe three times, I read dozens and dozens of books, I studied thousands of photos. But I always supplemented that research with imagination research might give you detail, but imagination supplies the direction in which to apply all that detail.
Anthony Doerr
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You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.
Anthony Doerr
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Don’t you want to be alive before you die?
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You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't.
Anthony Doerr
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I guess whatever maturity is there may be there because I've been keeping a journal forever. In high school my friends would make fun of me - you're doing your man diary again. So I was always trying to translate experience into words.
Anthony Doerr
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My preference is for prose with more silence in it, language that contains more pockets of strangeness.
Anthony Doerr
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WWII is something contemporary readers already know a lot about. If our schools are doing their jobs, they know about the invasion of Normandy, the Hitler Youth, the Holocaust, and at least a few of the horrors of the Eastern Front.
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It took me about three years to write About Grace. I wasn't teaching two of those years, so I was working eight-hour days, five days a week. And it would include research and reading - it wasn't just a blank page, laying down words.
Anthony Doerr
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I do fish. I think there is a connection between thinking and fishing mostly because you spend a lot of time up to your waist in water without a whole lot to keep your mind busy.
Anthony Doerr
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Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor-it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.
Anthony Doerr
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It wasn't until I was 26 or 25 when I started sending work out to magazines.
Anthony Doerr
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It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.
Anthony Doerr
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We live through books we have adventures in them, we lead alternative lives through them. We expand our memories through them. And that sometimes art can offer us more intense experiences of the world than life itself can.
Anthony Doerr