It's funny, don't you think, how time seems to do a lot of things? It flies, it tells, and worst of all, it runs out.

THE LAST WORDS OF MAX VANDENBURG: You've done enough.

All my friends seem to be smart arses. Don't ask me why. Like many things, it is what it is.

And they would all smile at the beauty of destruction.

Please believe me when I tell you that I picked up each soul that day as if it were newly born. I even kissed a few weary, poisoned cheeks. I listened to their last, gasping cries. Their vanishing words. I watched their love visions and freed them from their fear.

Summer came. For the book thief, everything was going nicely. For me, the sky was the color of Jews. When their bodies had finished scouring for gaps in the door, their souls rose up. When their fingernails had scratched at the wood and in some cases were nailed into it by the sheer force of desperation, their spirits came toward me, into my arms, and we climbed out of those shower facilities, onto the roof and up, into eternity's certain breadth. They just kept feeding me. Minute after minute. Shower after shower.

Stealing it, in a sick kind of sense, was like earning it.