Just be patient, she told herself, and with the mounting pages, the strength of her writing fist grew.

I'm not one of these 'the characters write themselves; the story just fell out of me' kind of writers. Wish it was like that.

It’s the leftover humans. The survivors. They’re the ones I can’t stand to look at, although on many occasions I still fail. I deliberately seek out the colors to keep my mind off them, but now and then, I witness the ones who are left behind, crumbling among the jigsaw puzzle of realization, despair, and surprises. They have punctured hearts. They have beaten lungs. Which in turn brings me to the subject I am telling you about tonight, or today, or whatever the hour and color. It’s the story of one of those perpetual survivors –an expert at being left behind.

And I can promise you something, because it was a thing I saw many years later - a vision in the book thief herself - that as she knelt next to Hans Hubermann, she watched him stand and play the accordion. He stood and strapped it on in the alps of broken houses and played the accordion with kindness silver eyes and even a cigarette slouched on his lips. The bellows breathed and the tall man played for Liesel Meminger one last time as the sky was slowly taken away from her.

Sometimes you read a book so special that you want to carry it around with you for months after you've finished just to stay near it.

The injury of words. Yes, the brutality of words.

I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.