"All the Lights We Cannot See"

The last WWII novel ("The City of Thieves") left me too depressed for words or completion. Anthony Doerr is gentler, thankfully.

• To the bombardiers the walled city on its granite headland drawing ever closer, looks like an unholy tooth, something black and dangerous, a final abscess to be lanced away.
• She could hear the bombers when they are three miles away, a mounting static, the hum inside a seashell.
• a small inclination everyday toward success or failure, but no curses.
• "I heard that the diamond is like a piece of light from the original world, before it fell. A piece of light rained to earth from God."
• Her fingers walked the tightrope of sentences.
• Even the poorest pithouse possess the state-sponsored Volksempfänger VE301, a mass-produced radio stamped with an eagle and a swastika, incapable of shortwave, marked only with German frequencies.
• The war drops its question mark.
• And yet everything radiates tension, as if the city has been built upon the skin of a balloon and someone is inflating it toward the breaking point.
• Open your eyes, concluded the man, and see what you can with them before they close forever, and then a piano comes on, playing a lonely song that sounds to Werner like a golden boat traveling a dark river, a progression of harmonies that transfigures Zollverein: the houses turned to mist, the mines filled in, the smokestacks fallen, an ancient sea spilling through the streets, and the air streaming with possibility.
• The appetite for oxygen is such that objects heavier than house cats are dragged into flames.
• They are each a mound of clay, and the potter that is the portly shiny-faced commandant is throwing four hundred identical pots.
• (The villain enters on stage:) All of Europe, and he aims to find one pebble tucked inside its folds.
• (Couch surfing with her shell-shocked great uncle:) They visit Scotland, New York city, Santiago. More than once they put on winter coats and visit the moon.
• (Under magnesium flash meant to illuminate for snipers:) I'd become paralysed sometimes. I could not move any part of my body, not even my fingers, not even my eyelids. Henri would stay right beside me, whisper those (radio) scripts, the ones we recorded, sometimes all night, over and over, as though weaving some kind of protective screen around us until morning comes.
• endure the slow rain of time / the daylight unwinds from the trees
• I just want something very smaller, smaller than both of your kneecaps.
• Others would use scanners, pistol barrels, explosives, muscle. Von Rumple would use the cheapest materials, only minutes, only hours.   
• Artillery has stopped for the moment, and the pre-dawn fires inside the walls have taken on a steady middle life, an adulthood.
• Berlin, the very name like two sharp bells of glory.
• Werner tries to see what Fredrick sees, a time before photography, before binoculars, and here's someone willing to tramp out into a wilderness brimming with the unknown and bring back paintings. A book not so much full of birds as full of evanescence, of blue-winged, trumpeting mysteries.
• (The Old Women's Resistance Club)
• Each story Werner hears contains its own flaws and contradictions, as if truth is a machine with its gears not meshing.
• leave them glazed and dazzled, as if they ward off a vast and inevitable tidal wave of anguish only by staying drunk forever on rigor, exercise and gleaming boot leather.
• (His sister,) the static in his signal that they can sense
• (News of father's death:) The boy looks up at them, mouth full and an unsteady face, and follow the officers out.
• (After rigging out a radio after the bomb raid:) Static, rich and steady.
• The air swarms with (static) day in and night, a great, sad, sinister Ukrainian static that seems to be here long before humans have figured out how to hear it.
• Werner withdraw the aerial, and they grind off the road, directly through the sunflowers, punching them down as they go. The tallest are nearly as tall as the truck, and their big dry heads drum against the roof of the cab and the sides of the box.
• The echo of the broadcast seemed to glimmer in the air for a moment, as though he could reach out and let it float down into his hands.
• Now it seems there are only shadows and silence. Silence is the fruit of the occupation; it hangs in branches, seeps from gutters…So many windows are dark. It’s as if the city has become a library of books in an unknown language, the houses great shelves of illegible volumes, the lamps all extinguished.
• shits out all his civilization / seismic, engulfing indifference of the world
• (Start of Clare de Lune:) the chords rising peacefully, each a candle leading deeper into a forest.
• Everywhere hung arcades and curtains and pendants of flowers.
• Big Claudia had chanced upon a paper bakery box, sealed with gold tape, blocks of grease showed through the cardboard. Together the girls stared at it, like something from an unfallen world.
• It's the obliviousness of our children that saves us.