Cloud Cuckoo Land Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Cloud Cuckoo Land. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
WHAT YOU ALREADY HAVE IS BETTER THAN WHAT YOU SO DESPERATELY SEEK
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Hope is the pillar that holds up the world.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
strange how suffering can look beautiful if you get far enough away
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
what's so beautiful about a fool is that a fool never knows when to give up
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Why is it so hard to transcend the identities assigned to us when we were young?
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
The world as it is is enough.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Forgetting, he is learning, is how the world heals itself.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
The things that look fixed in the world, child—mountains, wealth, empires—their permanence is only an illusion. We believe they will last, but that is only because of the brevity of our own lives. From the perspective of God, cities like this come and go like anthills.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Why can't healing happen as quickly as wounding?
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
I know why those librarians read the old stories to you,” Rex says. “Because if it’s told well enough, for as long as the story lasts, you get to slip the trap.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Some stories," she says, "can be both false and true at the same time.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
That’s what the gods do,” he says, “they spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Fear of the thing,” Maher murmurs, more to himself than to Omeir, “will be more powerful than the thing itself.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Movies make you think civilization will end fast, like with aliens and explosions, but really it'll end slow. Ours is already ending, it's just ending too slow for people to notice.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
And as he looked, turning the leaf over and back, Aethon saw that the cities on both sides of the page, the dark ones and the bright ones, were one and the same, that there is no peace without war, no life without death, and he was afraid.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
...in time you will come to believe that there is nobility in being part of an enterprise that will outlast you.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
You can cling to this world for a thousand years and still be plucked out of it in a breath.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
All my life, he thinks, my best companions cannot speak the same language as me.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
To rescue one phrase from oblivion? It's the most exciting thing, I can't tell you: it's like digging up one end of a buried wire and realizing that it's connected to someone eighteen centuries dead.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
The premier achievement of human history, they said, the triumph of memory over the obliterating forces of destruction and erasure.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Time: the most violent war engine of all.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
There is magic in this place, the owl seems to say. You just have to sit and breathe and wait and it will find you. He sits and breathes and waits and the Earth travels another thousand kilometers along its orbit. Lifelong knots deep inside the boy loosen.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Repository,” he finally says, “you know this word? A resting place. A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.” His eyes open very widely then, as though he peers into a great darkness. “But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
He should have risked more. It has taken him his whole life to accept himself, and he is surprised to understand that now that he can, he does not long for one more year, one more month: eighty-six years has been enough. In a life you accumulate so many memories, your brain constantly winnowing through them, weighing consequence, burying pain, but somehow by the time you’re this age you still end up dragging a monumental sack of memories behind you, a burden as heavy as a continent, and eventually it becomes time to take them out of the world.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Almost overnight, the streets glow with meaning. She reads inscriptions on coins, on cornerstones and tombstones, on lead seals and buttress piers and marble plaques embedded into the defensive walls—each twisting lane of the city a great battered manuscript in its own right.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
How do men convince themselves that others must die so they might live?
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Boil the words you already know down to their bones,' Rex [Browning] says, 'and usually you find the ancients sitting there at the bottom of the pot, staring back up.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Anna remembers something Licinius said: that a story is a way of stretching time.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
You remembers, boy,” he says, “there is no bad weathers, only bad clothes.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
It’s not so much the contents of the song. It’s that the song was still being sung.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Turn a page, walk the lines of sentences: the singer steps out, and conjures a world of color and noise in the space inside your head.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
The truth is Canada is a cloud-cuckoo-land, an insufferably rich country governed by idiots, its self-made problems offering comic relief to the ills of the real world out there, where famine and racial strife and vandals in office are the unhappy rule.
Mordecai Richler (Barney's Version)
a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
To select one word was to commit to a single path when the maze contains thousands.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
...he that knows all that Learning ever writ, knows only this--that he knows nothing yet. [Antonius Diogenes, trans. by Zeno Ninis]
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Each sign signifies a sound, and to link sounds is to form words, and to link words is to construct worlds.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Stranger, whoever you are, open this to learn what will amaze you.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
A library, no mater how humble or grand, is a series of sacred gateways. You pass through them and leave your own city behind; you journey through time and space; and for a little while, you escape the confines of your own circumstances. Each of us who are readers gets to live through a multiplicity of eras; we get to tiptoe through, to borrow Jorge Luis Borge’s phrase, ‘a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent, and parallel times.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
By age seventeen he [Seymoure Sthulman]'d convinced himself that every human being he saw was a parasite, captive to the dictates of consumption. But as he reconstructs Zeno's translation, he realizes that the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we all are beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Day after day, the tall Italian said, year after year, time wipes the old books from the world.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
All her life she has been led to believe that she is a child born at the end of things: the empire, the era, the reign of men on earth. But in the glow of the scribes' enthusiasm, she senses that in a city like Urbino, beyond the horizon, other possibilities might exist, and in daydreams she takes flight across the Aegean, through her spread fingers, until she alights in a bright clean palace, full of Justice and Moderation, its rooms lined with books, free to anyone who can read them.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Sometimes,” he says, “when I feel like working, I just sit and wait for the feeling to pass,
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
there comes a point where the pressure of relentless fear perforates rationality and the body moves independently of the mind.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Even if you don’t believe in it, I do. Otherwise what’s it all been for?
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
You needn't have it memorized, dear That's what the library is for.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Grandfather said that the ocean was large enough to contain every dream everyone had ever dreamed, but until now he had no comprehension of what that meant.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
In the scullery she says, if the end of the world is upon them, they might as well finish all the wine.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
In a life you accumulate so many memories, your brain constantly winnowing through them, weighing consequence, burying pain, but somehow by the time you’re this age you still end up dragging a monumental sack of memories behind you, a burden as heavy as a continent, and eventually it becomes time to take them out of the world.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
The things that look fixed in the world, child—mountains, wealth, empires—their permanence is only an illusion. We believe they will last, but that is only because of the brevity of our own lives.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Felix had gone to live in a lotus land of his imagination. Where what is desired is dreamed of as already happened, where obstacles dissolve under the weight of desire, and where reality has vanished entirely.
Iain Pears (The Dream of Scipio)
Repository,” he finally says, “you know this word? A resting place. A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Ninth-grade U.S. history: Not to hurt feelings but that chapter you assigned? That was all “Columbus is great,” “The Indians sure loved Thanksgiving,” “Let’s brainwash everyone.” I found way better stuff at the library,
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Part fairy tale, part fool’s errand, part science-fiction, part utopian satire, Photios’s epitome suggests it could have been one of the more fascinating of the ancient novels.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
One in the morning," Bunny says, "and one at night. Sometimes, kid, we all need a little help shoveling the shit.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
On Earth, when I was a boy, most everybody got sick. Rashes, funny little fevers. All the unmodified people got sick every now and then. It's part of being human.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Boats motor back and forth, unzipping the water.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
that a story is a way of stretching time.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Why can’t healing happen as quickly as wounding? You twist an ankle, break a bone- you can be hurt in a heartbeat. Hour by hour, week by week, year by year, the cells in your body labor to remake themselves the way they were the instant before your injury. But even then you’re never the same: not quite.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
I was playing Rasputin and what was motivating him was crumpet really, and I was extremely keen on crumpet so I was really rather good as Rasputin. And my next catastrophic failure was Macbeth, who I played in the style of a crumpet-lover, and then when Doctor Who came along, I embraced this lunacy, this cloud-cuckoo-land where people had to be convinced by absolute nonsense. I came from a very religious background, so it was easy for me to believe in something I knew nothing about.
Tom Baker
When all you have is a shard of papyrus with a few words on it,” Rex says, “or a single line quoted in somebody else’s text, the potential of what’s lost haunts you. It’s like the boys who died in Korea. We grieve them the most because we never saw the men they would become.” Zeno thinks of his father: how much easier it was to be a hero when you no longer walked the earth.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
All her life she has been told to believe, tried to believe, wanted to believe, that if a person suffers long enough, works hard enough, then she—like Ulysses washing up on the shore of the kingdom of brave Alcinous—will ultimately reach a better place. That through suffering we are redeemed. That by dying we live again. And maybe in the end that’s the easier thing. But Anna is tired of suffering. And she is not ready to die.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Hatred, Omeir sees, is contagious, spreading through the ranks like a disease. Already, three weeks into the siege, some of the men fight no longer for God or the sultan or plunder but out of a fearful rage. Kill them all. Get this over with.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Anna imagines Antonius Diogenes, whoever he was, setting knife to quill, quill to ink, ink to scroll, placing one more barricade in front of Aethon, stretching time for another purpose: to detain his niece in the living world for a little longer.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
You are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to nobody!
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
There are many people in this world,” Himerius says, “who do not care to what purposes their engines are put. So long as they are paid.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Grandfather, Omeir thinks, already I have seen things I did not know how to dream.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Thermal scanners? Laser sights? Above the junipers, a trio of blue lights hover: some kind of remote-controlled drone. These, the creatures we have chosen to repopulate the earth.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Three a lucky number, Chryse always said: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Birth, life, death. Past, present, future.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Παράδεισο, parádeisos, paradise: it means garden.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
And the tale I have to tell is so ludicrous, so incredible, that you’ll never believe a word of it, and yet”—she taps the end of his nose—“it’s true.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
he realizes that the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Everyone seems to agree that the world will end soon and the only essential task is to cleanse the besmirchment from one’s soul before that day comes.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
In a child’s cursive, beneath the crossed-out lines, Aethon’s new line is handwritten in the margin, “The world as it is is enough.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Sheep Shagger, Fruit Punch, Pansy, Zero. Why is it so hard to transcend the identities assigned to us when we were young?
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Μῦθος, he wrote, mýthos, a conversation, a tale, a legend from the darkness before the days of Christ. “Some stories,” she says, “can be both false and true at the same time.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Humans are best understood as exterminators, he says. Every habitat we enter, we decimate, and now we have overrun the earth. The next thing we exterminate will be ourselves.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
You said that what’s so beautiful about a fool is that a fool never knows when to give up.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Movies make you think civilization will end fast, like with aliens and explosions, but really it’ll end slow. Ours is already ending, it’s just ending too slow for people to notice.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Nostos, yes. The act of homecoming, a safe arrival. Of course, mapping a single English word onto a Greek one is almost always slippery. A nostos also means a song about a homecoming.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
You and I will never reach Beta Oph2, dear, and that is a painful truth. But in time you will come to believe that there is nobility in being a part of an enterprise that will outlast you.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Of all the mad things we humans do, Rex once told him, there might be nothing more humbling, or more noble, than trying to translate the dead languages. We don’t know how the old Greeks sounded when they spoke; we can scarcely map their words onto ours; from the very start, we’re doomed to fail. But in the attempt, Rex said, in trying to drag something across the river from the murk of history into our time, into our language: that was, he said, the best kind of fool’s errand. Zeno sharpens his pencil and tries again.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
He should have risked more. It has taken him his whole life to accept himself, and he is surprised to understand that now that he can, he does not long for one more year, one more month: eighty-six years has been enough.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Aethon,” says Olivia. “The fool you were telling us about. In the story? Even though he keeps going the wrong way, keeps getting turned into the wrong thing, he never gives up. He survives.” Zeno looks at her, some new understanding seeping into his consciousness.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
You’re my best friend,” Kami said, looking up into Angela’s stern face. “I could always trust you never to think I was crazy.” “Your faith is touching but totally misplaced,” Angela said. “I believe you to be a permanent inhabitant of cloud-cuckoo-land, and this year you may be getting elected mayor.” 
Sarah Rees Brennan (Unspoken (The Lynburn Legacy, #1))
Boil the words you already know down to their bones,” Rex says, “and usually you find the ancients sitting there at the bottom of the pot, staring back up.” Who says such things? And still Zeno steals glances: Rex’s mouth, his hair, his hands; there is the same pleasure in gazing at this man as in gazing at a fire.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
By age seventeen he’d convinced himself that every human he saw was a parasite, captive to the dictates of consumption. But as he reconstructs Zeno’s translation, he realizes that the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
How does life get to be like this? Where she wears her sister's castoff underlinen and a thrice-patched dress while men like Kalaphates go about in silk and velvet with servants trotting behind? While foreigners like these have basins of milk and courtyards of geese and a different coat for every feast day? She feels a scream building inside her, a shriek to shatter glass.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
He translates one book of the Iliad, two of the Odyssey, plus an admirable slice of Plato’s Republic. Five lines on an average day, ten on a good one, scribbled onto yellow legal pads in his crimped pencil-writing and stuffed into boxes beneath the dining table. Sometimes he believes his translations are adequate. Usually he decides they’re terrible. He shows them to no one.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Every day Patti Goss-Simpson brings four fish sticks to school in her Titan Deep Freeze lunch box and every day at 11:52 a.m., because the cafeteria is being remodeled, Patti puts her terrible fish sticks in the terrible microwave at the back of Mr. Bates’s room and presses the terrible beepy buttons and the smell that pours out feels to Seymour like he’s being pressed face-first into a swamp.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Konstance is old enough to understand that Father’s farm is unlike the other three: those spaces are tidy and systematic, while Farm 4 is a tangle of wires and sensors, grow-racks skewed at every angle, individual trays crowded with different species, creeping thyme beside radishes beside carrots. Long white hairs sprout from Father’s ears; he’s at least two decades older than the other children’s fathers; he’s always growing inedible flowers just to see what they look like and muttering in his funny accent about compost tea. He claims he can taste whether a lettuce has lived a happy life; he says one sniff of a properly grown chickpea can whisk him three zillion kilometers back to the fields who grew up in Scheria.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
The people in the Eden’s Gate houses fill their trash cans and pilot SUVs between their two homes and play music on Bluetooth speakers in their backyards and tell themselves they’re good people, conducting honorable, decent lives, living the so-called dream—as though America were an Eden where God’s warm benevolence fell equally across every soul. When in truth they’re participating in a pyramid scheme that’s chewing up everybody at the bottom, people like his mother. And they’re all congratulating themselves for it.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)
Patriotism,” said Lymond, “like honesty is a luxury with a very high face value which is quickly pricing itself out of the spiritual market altogether. [...] It is an emotion as well, and of course the emotion comes first. A child’s home and the ways of its life are sacrosanct, perfect, inviolate to the child. Add age; add security; add experience. In time we all admit our relatives and our neighbours, our fellow townsmen and even, perhaps, at last our fellow nationals to the threshold of tolerance. But the man living one inch beyond the boundary is an inveterate foe. [...] Patriotism is a fine hothouse for maggots. It breeds intolerance; it forces a spindle-legged, spurious riot of colour.… A man of only moderate powers enjoys the special sanction of purpose, the sense of ceremony; the echo of mysterious, lost and royal things; a trace of the broad, plain childish virtues of myth and legend and ballad. He wants advancement—what simpler way is there? He’s tired of the little seasons and looks for movement and change and an edge of peril and excitement; he enjoys the flowering of small talents lost in the dry courses of daily life. For all these reasons, men at least once in their lives move the finger which will take them to battle for their country.… “Patriotism,” said Lymond again. “It’s an opulent word, a mighty key to a royal Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. Patriotism; loyalty; a true conviction that of all the troubled and striving world, the soil of one’s fathers is noblest and best. A celestial competition for the best breed of man; a vehicle for shedding boredom and exercising surplus power or surplus talents or surplus money; an immature and bigoted intolerance which becomes the coin of barter in the markets of power— [...] These are not patriots but martyrs, dying in cheerful self-interest as the Christians died in the pleasant conviction of grace, leaving their example by chance to brood beneath the water and rise, miraculously, to refresh the centuries. The cry is raised: Our land is glorious under the sun. I have a need to believe it, they say. It is a virtue to believe it; and therefore I shall wring from this unassuming clod a passion and a power and a selflessness that otherwise would be laid unquickened in the grave. [...] “And who shall say they are wrong?” said Lymond. “There are those who will always cleave to the living country, and who with their uprooted imaginations might well make of it an instrument for good. Is it quite beyond us in this land? Is there no one will take up this priceless thing and say, Here is a nation, with such a soul; with such talents; with these failings and this native worth? In what fashion can this one people be brought to live in full vigour and serenity, and who, in their compassion and wisdom, will take it and lead it into the path?
Dorothy Dunnett (The Game of Kings (The Lymond Chronicles, #1))
Please,” they say, and their eyes glitter in the light. “Tell us what he found inside the goddess’s magical book.” “When Aethon peered into it,” she says, “he saw the heavens and the earth and all its lands scattered around the ocean, and all the animals and birds upon it. The cities were full of lanterns and gardens, and he could faintly hear music and singing, and he saw a wedding in one city with girls in bright linen robes, and boys with gold swords on silver belts, jumping through rings, doing handsprings and leaping and dancing in time. But on the next page he saw dark, flaming cities in which men were slaughtered in their fields, their wives enslaved in chains, and their children pitched over the walls onto pikes. He saw hounds eating corpses, and when he bent his ear low to the pages, he could hear the wailing. And as he looked, turning the leaf over and back, Aethon saw that the cities on both sides of the page, the dark ones and the bright ones, were one and the same, that there is no peace without war, no life without death, and he was afraid.
Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land)