All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel

Strange to think of his voice still flying through the air, already a country away, growing weaker every mile.

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

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

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

A months-old knot inside Marie-Laure begins to loosen.

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.

He turns. “Nichts,” he says. Nothing.

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

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