Markus Zusak Quotes (183 Quotes)

Liesel's blood had dried inside of her. It crumbled. She almost broke into pieces on the steps.

She didn't see him watching as he played, having no idea that Hans Hubermann's accordion was a story. In the times ahead, that story would arrive at 33 Himmel Street in the early hours of morning, wearing ruffled shoulders and a shivering jacket. It would carry a suitcase, a book, and two questions. A story. Story after story. Story within story.

The bombs were coming-and so was I.

The silence was always the greates temptation.

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

Beautiful women are the torment of my existence.

No, I'm not a saint, Sophie. I'm just another stupid human.

When we move apart, she looks at me again, till a small tear lifts itself up in her eye. It trips out to find a wrinkle and follows it down.

Can a person steal happiness? Or is just another internal, infernal human trick?

How do you tell if something's alive? You check for breathing.

In years to come, he would be a giver of bread, not a stealer - proof again of the contradictory human being. So much good, so much evil. Just add water.

Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness.

She took a step and didn't want to take any more, but she did.

The book thief has struck for the first time - the beginning of an illustrious career.

The sky was murky and deep, like quicksand. There was a young man parcelled up in barbed wire, like a crown of thorns. I untangled him and carried him out. High above the earth, we sank together, to our knees. It was just another day, 1918.

What great malice there could be in allowing something to live.

Believe it or not--it takes a lot of love to hate you like this.

Of course you're real-like any thought or any story. It's real when you're in it.

Why can't the world hear? I ask myself. Within a few moments I ask it many times. Because it doesn't care, I finally answer, and I know I'm right. It's like I've been chosen. But chosen for what? I ask.

Certainly war meant dying, but it always shifted the ground beneath a person's feet when it was someone who had once lived and breathed in close proximity.

Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die.

It kills me sometimes, how people die.

Make no mistake, the woman had a heart. She had a bigger one that people would think. There was a lot in it, stored up, high in miles of hidden shelving. Remember that she was the woman with the instrument strapped to her body in the long, moon-slit night.

She wanted none of those days to end, and it was always with disappointment that she watched the darkness stride forward.

The commitment had disappeared, and although he still watched the imagined glory of stealing, she could see now he was not believing. He was trying to believe it, and that's never a good sign.

The soft-spoken words fell off the side of the bed, emptying to the floor like powder.

When death captures me, he will feel my fist on his face.

Big things are often just little things that people notice.

Only hearts... They're in the inside of the inside of me.

You're far from this. This story is just another few hundred pages of your mind.

Could she smell my breath? Could she hear my cursed circular heart beat revolving like the crime it is in my deathly chest?

I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race - that rarely do I ever simply estimate it.

It was a Monday and they walked on a tightrope to the sun.

Mistakes, mistakes, it's all I seem capable of at times.

She was a girl with a mountain to climb.

The day was gray, the color of Europe.

The song was born on her breathe and died at her lips.

When finally she finished and stood herself up, he put his arm around her, best-buddy style, and they walked on. There was no request for a kiss. Nothing like that. You can love Rudy for that, if you like.

Crowds of questions stream through me like lines of people exiting a soccer ground or a concert. They push and shove and trip. Some make their way around. Some remain in their seats, waiting for their opportunity.

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.

A bathrobe answered the door. Inside it, a woman...

Death waits for no man - and if he does, he doesn't usually wait for very long.

I can promise you that the world is a factory. The sun stirs it, the humans rule it. And I remain. I carry them away.- spoken by death

It was a style not of perfection, but warmth. Even mistakes had a good feeling about them

No matter how many times she was told that she was loved, there was no recognition that the proof was in the abandonment.

She was battered and beaten up, and not smiling this time. Liesel could see it on her face. Blood leaked from her nose and licked at her lips. Her eyes had blackened. Cuts had opened up and a series of wounds were rising to the surface of her skin. All from the words. From Liesel's words.

The Germans in basements were pitiable, surely, but at least they had a chance. That basement was not a washroom. They were not sent there for a shower. For those people, life was still achievable.

The words. Why did they have to exist? Without words, the Fuhrer was nothing.

When it came down to it, one of them called the shots. The other did what he was told. The question is, what if the other is a lot more than one?

He prefers not to ruin things with any more questions. What it is is what it is.