Two weeks to change the world, fourteen days to destroy it.

He does something to me, that boy. Every time. It’s his only detriment. He steps on my heart. He makes me cry.

...they watched the humans disappear. They watched them dissolve, like moving tablets in the humid air.

They were French, they were Jews, and they were you.

Very quickly, very suddenly, words fell through my mind. They landed on the floor of my thoughts, and in there, down there, I started to pick the words up. They were excerpts of truth gathered from inside me.

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

For at least twenty minutes she handed out the story. The youngest kids were soothed by her voice, and everyone else saw visions of the whistler running from the scene. Liesel did not. The book thief saw only the mechanics of the words--their bodies stranded on the paper, beaten down for her to walk on. Somewhere, too, in the gaps between a period and the next capital letter, there was also Max. She remembered reading to him when he was sick. It he in the basement? she wondered. Or is he stealing a glimpse of the sky again?