All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel

She does not want to be one of those middle-aged women who thinks of nothing but her own painful history.

“You know how diamonds—how all crystals—grow, Laurette? By adding microscopic layers, a few thousand atoms every month, each atop the next. Millennia after millennia. That’s how stories accumulate too. All the old stones accumulate stories.

See obstacles as opportunities, Reinhold. See obstacles as inspirations.

never has Werner felt part of something so single-minded. Never has he felt such a hunger to belong.

It seems to Werner that in the space between whatever has happened already and whatever is to come hovers an invisible borderland, the known on one side and the unknown on the other.

Can you imagine one hundred million years? Every summer for the whole life of that plant, its leaves caught what light they could and transformed the sun’s energy into itself. Into bark, twigs, stems. Because plants eat light, in much the way we eat food. But then the plant died and fell, probably into water, and decayed into peat, and the peat was

“But we are the good guys. Aren’t we, Uncle?” “I hope so. I hope we are.”

He says everyone remembers the last war, and no one is mad enough to go through that again.

He turns. “Nichts,” he says. Nothing.