Markus Zusak Quotes

Her teeth were like a soccer crowd, crammed in.

Living in Sydney, I've taken the chance to start surfing again. One of my best memories of growing up is catching my first proper wave and surfing across it and my brother cheering at me from the shore.

It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on, coughing and searching, and finding.

It's insane to be a writer and not be a reader. When I'm writing I'm more likely to be reading four or five books at once, just in bits and pieces rather than subjecting myself to a really brilliant book and thinking, "Well what's the point of me writing anything?" I'm more likely to read a book through when I take a break from writing.

You can kill a man with those words. No gun. No bullets. Just words and a girl.

July 24, 6:03 A.M. The laundry was warm and the rafters were firm, and Michael Holzapfel jumped from the chair as if it were a cliff... Michael Holzapfel knew what he was doing. He killed himself for wanting to live.

If her soul ever leaks, I want it to land on me.

She looks at the swings, and I can see she’s imagining what they’d look like if the kids weren’t there. The guilt of this holds her down momentarily. It appears to be there constantly. Never far away, despite her love for them. I realize that nothing belongs to her anymore and she belongs to everything.

There was once a strange, small man. He decided three important details about his life: 1. He would part his hair from the opposite side to everyone else. 2. He would make himself a small, strange mustache. 3. He would one day rule the world. ...Yes, the Fuhrer decided that he would rule the world with words.

Fear is shiny. Ruthless in the eyes.

He killed himself for wanting to live.

It brewed in her as she eyed the pages full to the brims of their bellies with paragraphs and words. You bastards, she thought. You lovely bastards. Don’t make me happy. Please, don’t fill me up and let me think that something good can come of any of this.

She closes the door completely, and I crouch there. I allow myself to fall forward and rest my head on the door frame. My breath bleeds. My heartbeat drowns my ears.

...and the night is so deep and dark that I wonder if the sun will ever come up.

Maybe one morning I’ll wake up and step outside of myself to look back at the old me lying dead among the sheets.

Five hundred souls. I carried them in my fingers, like suitcases. Or I'd throw them over my shoulder. It was only the the children I carried in my arms.

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.

We expressed love for this dog by ... knowing without showing that we cared for him.

A SMALL PIECE OF TRUTH I do not carry a sickle or scythe. I only wear a hooded black robe when it's cold. And I don't have those skull-like facial features you seem to enjoy pinning on me from a distance. You want to know what I truly look like? I'll help you out. Find yourself a mirror while I continue.

The night is alive with stars, and when I lie down and look up, I get lost up there. I feel like I’m falling, but upward, into the abyss of sky above me.

an expression of surprise falls from her face, though she's trying to keep it. it breaks off and she seems to catch it and fidget with it in her hands.

Our footsteps run, and I don't want them to end. I want to run and laugh and feel like this forever. I want to avoid any awkward moment when the realness of reality sticks its fork into our flesh, leaving us standing there, together. I want to stay here, in this moment, and never go to other places, where we don't know what to say or what to do.

Things always seem to glide away. They come to you, stay a moment, then leave again.

The conversation of bullets.

The sky is blue today, Max, and there is a big long cloud, and it's stretched out, like a rope. At the end of it, the sun is like a yellow hole. . .

I'm asking you, I'm begging you, could you please shut your mouth for just five minutes?" You can imagine the reaction. They ended up in the basement.

The bittersweetness of uncertainty: To win or to lose.

He watched them grow, until eventually, great forests of words had risen throughout Germany.... It was a nation of farmed thoughts.

There were people everywhere on the city street, but the stranger could not have been more alone if it were empty.

It’s a small story really, about, among other things: * A girl * Some words * An accordionist * Some fanatical Germans * A Jewish fist fighter * And quite a lot of thievery

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

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

She even touches Jimmy's face on the photos, and I see what it is to love someone like Milla loved that man. Her fingertips are made of love.

I want to talk to him. I want to ask him about that girl and if he loved her and still misses her.

I could introduce myself properly, but it's not really necessary. You will know me well enough and soon enough, depending on a diverse range of variables. It suffices to say that at some point in time, I will be standing over you, as genially as possible. Your soul will be in my arms. A color will be perched on my shoulder. I will carry you gently away.

The impoverished always try to keep moving, as if relocating might help. They ignore the reality that a new version of the same old problem will be waiting at the end of the trip- the relative you cringe to kiss.

When a person's last response was Saumensch or Saukerl or Arschloch, you knew you had them beaten.

As we walk back, it feels like the city is engulfing us. Adrenalin still pours through our veins. Sparks flow through to our fingers. We've still been running in the mornings, but the city's different then. It's filled with hope and with bristles of winter sunshine. In the evening, it's like it dies, waiting to be born again the next morning.

They were glued down, every last one of them. A packet of souls. Was it fate?Misfortune?Is that what glued them down like that?Of course not.Let's not be stupid.It probably had more to do with the hurled bombs, thrown down by humans hiding in the clouds.

It's my heart that is tired. A thirteen-year-old heart shouldn't feel like this.

It would then be brought abruptly to an end, for the brightness had shown suffering the way.

One wild card was yet to be played.

So many humans. So many colours. They keep triggering inside me. They harass my memory. I see them tall in their heaps, all mounted on top of each other. There is air like plastic, a horizon like setting glue. There are skies manufactured by people, punctured and leaking, and there are soft, coal-coloured clouds, beating, like black hearts. And then. There is death. Making his way through all of it. On the surface: unflappable, unwavering. Below: unnerved, untied, and undone.

I want words at my funeral. But I guess that means you need life in your life.

There were not many people who could say that their education had been paid for with cigarettes.

Beautiful women are the torment of my existence.

It's hard to not like a man who not only notices the colors, but speaks them

People die of broken hearts. They have heart attacks. And it's the heart that hurts most when things go wrong and fall apart.