Markus Zusak Quotes (183 Quotes)

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.

I feel like every other book has been a small piece of me. This is every piece of me.

So many teenage books say, 'This is in your voice, this is about you,' and that's great. We really need that. But we also need books that say, 'This is also for you, but you need to come up here, to step up to this.

Every time you experiment with something, every time you've tried something, you can cross that off. Every time you find something that doesn't work, you're a step closer to what does work. Just do the work every day -- and do it and do it.

I've got every Dr Seuss book there is. Everything was red, like the sky was on fire. That was a memory that I could see really clearly as a child, a very visual image.

I wanted Death to talk in a way that humans don't speak. One thing I stood by in the editing process was when Death says things like 'the trees who stood' or 'the sky who was this color.' He refers to the sky and the trees and the clouds as though they're colleagues.

It's the first time I've been really worried. It's the first time I've written a book and thought, 'Can I do a better book' I don't know if I can.

The idea that he is haunted by what humans do I just loved that irony because we are all so afraid of dying. Originally, he was a very different voice. He was supercilious. He was enjoying his work too much and he would say creepy things, which is the obvious.