There was no one to really argue with, but Mama managed it expertly every chance she had. She could argue with the entire world in that kitchen and almost every evening, she did.
There was no one to really argue with, but Mama managed it expertly every chance she had. She could argue with the entire world in that kitchen and almost every evening, she did.
When she faced the noise, she found the mayor's wife in a brand-new bathrobe and slippers. On the breast pocket of the robe sat an embroidered swastika. Propaganda even reached the bathroom.
A statue of the book thief stood in the courtyard... it's very rare, don't you think, for a statue to appear before it's subject has become famous?
Handfuls of frosty water can make almost anyone smile, but it cannot make them forget.
I only know that all of those people would have sensed me that night, excluding the youngest of the children. I was the suggestion. I was the advice, my imagined feet walking into the kitchen and down the corridor.
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 much good, so much evil. Just add water.
The nightmares arrived like they always did, much like the best player in the opposition when you've heard rumors that he might be injured or sick-but there he is, warming up with the rest of them, ready to take the field.
There were not many people who could say that their education had been paid for with cigarettes.
Who was there to soothe him as life's rug was snatched from under his sleeping feet?
After perhaps thirty meters, just as a soldier turned around, the girl was felled. Hands were clamped upon her from behind and the boy next door brought her down. He forced her knees to the road and suffered the penalty. He collected her punches as if they were presents. Her bony hands and elbows were accepted with nothing but a few short moans. He accumulated the loud, clumsy specks of saliva and tears as if they were lovely to his face, and more important, he was able to hold her down.
He left Himmel Street wearing his hangover and a suit.
I want words at my funeral. But I guess that means you need life in your life.
It's hard to not like a man who not only notices the colors, but speaks them
Or had she always loved him? It's likely. Restricted as she was from speaking, she wanted him to kiss her. She wanted him to drag her hand across and pull her over. It didn't matter where. Her mouth, her neck, her cheek. Her skin was empty for it, waiting.
Some of you are most likely thinking that white is not really a color and all of that tired sort of nonsense. Well, I'm here to tell you that it is. White is without question a color, and personally, I don't think you want to argue with me.
The notes were born on her breath, and they died at her lips.
There were stars. They burned my eyes.
Whoever named Himmel Street certainly had a healthy sense of irony. Not that is was a living hell. It wasn't. But is sure as hell wasn't heaven, either.
All told, she owned fourteen books, but she saw her story as being made up predominantly of ten of them. Of those ten, six were stolen, one showed up at the kitchen table, two were made for her by a hidden Jew, and one was delivered by a soft, yellow-dressed afternoon.
He was hanging from one of the rafters in a laundry up near Frau Diller's. Another human pendulum. Another clock, stopped.
I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.
It's my heart that is tired. A thirteen-year-old heart shouldn't feel like this.
People have defining moments, i suppose, especially when they're children.
Sometimes I imagined how everything looked above those clouds, knowing without question that the sun was blond, and the endless atmosphere was a giant blue eye
The orange flames waved at the crowd as paper and print dissolved inside them. Burning words were torn from their sentences.
They were French, they were Jews, and they were you.
Within minutes, mounds of concrete and earth were stacked and piled. The streets were ruptured veins. Blood streamed till it was dried on the road, and the bodies were stuck there, like driftwood after the flood.
An attribute of Rosa Hubermann, she was a good woman for a crisis.
He was skinny with soft hair, and his thick, murky eyes watched as the stranger played one more song in the heavy room. From face to face, he looked on as the man played and the woman wept. The different notes handled her eyes. Such sadness.
I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race - that rarely do I even simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant...I AM HAUNTED BY HUMANS.
Just be patient, she told herself, and with the mounting pages, the strength of her writing fist grew.
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.
Somewhere, far down, there was an itch in his heart, but he made it a point not to scratch it. He was afraid of what might come leaking out.
The paper landed on the table, but the news was stapled to his chest. A tattoo.
They were frightened, no question, but they were not afraid of me. It was a fear of messing up and having to face themselves again, and facing the world, and the likes of you.
Yes, I'm often reminded of her, and in one of my array of pockets, I have kept her story to retell. It is one of the small legion I carry, each one extraordinary in its own right. Each one an attempt - an immense leap of an attempt - to prove to me that you, and your human existence, are worth it.
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.
He watched them grow, until eventually, great forests of words had risen throughout Germany.... It was a nation of farmed thoughts.
If they killed him tonight, at least he would die alive.
Late in February, she stood on Munich Street and watched a single giant cloud come over the hills like a white monster. It climbed the mountains. The sun was eclipsed, and in its place, a white beast with a gray heart watched the town.
Rosa Hubermann was sitting on the edge of the bed with her husband's accordion tied to her chest. Her fingers hovered above the keys. She did not move. She didn't ever appear to be breathing.
Stealing it, in a sick kind of sense, was like earning it.
The point is, Ilsa Hermann had decided to make suffering her triumph. When it refused to let go of her, she succumbed to it. She embraced it.
They'd been standing like that for thirty seconds of forever.
You cannot be afraid, Read the book. Smile at it. It's a great book-the greatest book you've ever read.
And they would all smile at the beauty of destruction.
Her teeth were like a soccer crowd, crammed in.
If you can't imagine it, think clumsy silence. Think bits and pieces of floating despair. And drowning in a train.
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories