Markus Zusak Quotes - Page 2

The thing is, I don't even hate cops. To tell you the truth, I actually feel a little sorry for them.

When you looked out my window you could see the whole city crouched under a blanket of car smog.

Even now, I wonder how much of my life is convinced.

Soon, there was nothing but scraps of words littered between her legs and all around her. Ther words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn't be any of this. Without words, the Fuhrer was nothing. There would be no limping prisoners, no need for consolation or wordly tricks to make us feel better.

There are pieces of me on the ground.

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

As always, she was carrying the washing. Rudy was carrying two buckets of cold water, or as he put it, two buckets of future ice.

All four of us were young and undaunted and our smiles were so strong that it made me smile even then on the couch, with a kind of loss.

Make sure you live,' she said. 'As decent as you can. I know you'll make mistakes, but sometimes you're meant to, okay?

He was waving. "Saukerl," she laughed, and as she held up her hand, she knew completely that he was simultaneously calling her a Saumensch. I think that's as close to love as eleven-year-olds can get.

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

I stood there and stared, into the sky and at the city around me. I stood, hands at my side, and I saw what had happened to me and who I was and the way things would always be for me. Truth. There was no more wishing, or wondering. I knew who I was, and what I would always do. I believed it, as my teeth touched and my eyes were overrun.

Together, they would watch everything that was so carefully planned collapse, and they would smile at the beauty of destruction.

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

The city was dark except for the building lights that seemed to appear like sores - like bandaids had been ripped off to expose the city's skin.

One day, Liesel.' he said, 'you'll be dying to kiss me.

I guess that’s the beauty of books. When they finish they don’t really finish.

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.

***A KEY WORD*** Imagined

I wanted to tell the book thief many things, about beauty and brutality. But what couldI tell her about those things that she didn't already know? I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race - that rarely do I ever 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.None of those things, however, came out of my mouth.All I was able to do was turn to Liesel Meminger and tell her the only truth I truly know. I said it to the book thief and I say it now to you.I am haunted by humans.

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.

An eleven-year-old girl is many things, but she is not stupid.

If you can't imagine it, think clumsy silence. Think bits and pieces of floating despair. And drowning in a train.

Best friends one, and now we have almost nothing to say to each other. It was interesting, how he had joined those guys and I just stayed on my own. I didn't like it or dislike it. It was just funny that things had turned out that way.

I don't have much interest in building mystery. Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It's the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me.

Time will tell, I suppose, or at least, these pages will.

The moon was sewn into the sky that night

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.

For a long time, she sat and saw.She had seen her brother die with one eye open, on still in a dream. She had said goodbye to her mother and imagined her lonely wait for a train back home to oblivion. A woman of wire had laid herself down, her scream traveling the street, till it fell sideways like a rolling coin starved of momentum. A young man was hung by a rope made of Stalingrad snow. She had watched a bomber pilot die in a metal case. She had seen a Jewish man who had twice given her the most beautiful pages of her life marched to a concentration camp. And at the center of all of it, she saw the Fuhrer shouting his words and passing them around.Those images were the world, and it stewed in her as she sat with the lovely books and their manicured titles. It brewed in her as she eyed the pages full to the brims of their bellies with paragraphs and words.

If only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter.

It could be worse. I could be you.

In the darkness of my dark-beating heart, I know. He'd have loved it, all right.

She kept watching the words.

I wanted to drown inside a woman in the feeling and drooling of the love I could give her. I wanted her pulse to crush me with its intensity. That's what I wanted. That's what I wanted myself to be.

Because you don't learn anything unless you can find the patience to read. TV takes that away from you. It robs you from your mind.

The point is, it didn’t really matter what the book was about. It was what it meant that was important.

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.

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.

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.

She couldn't tell exactly where the words came from. What mattered was that they reached her. They arrived and kneeled next to her bed.

The scribbled signature black, onto the blinding global white, onto the thick soupy red.

... tried praying for him ...but I couldn't. I just couldn't. Don't ask me why. I hoped that he was okay, but I couldn't summon the strength to pray for it.

On many counts, taking a boy like Rudy Steiner was robbery--so much life, so much to live for--yet somehow, I'm certain he would have loved to see the frightening rubble and the swelling of the sky on the night he passed away. He'd have cried and turned and smiled if only he could have seen the book thief on her hands and knees, next to his decimated body. He'd have been glad to witness her kissing his dusty, bomb-hit lips.Yes, I know it.In the darkness of my dark-beating heart, I know. He'd have loved it all right.You see?Even death has a heart.

I don't leave a note.There's nothing else to do. At first, I'd wanted to write Merry Christmas on the box somewhere, but I decide against it. This isn't about words.It's about glowing lights and small things that are big.

The only people we want to blame are ourselves, because it will be ourselves that we rely upon.

My mouth opened.It happened.Yes, with my head thrown into the sky, I started howling.Arms stretched out next to me, I howled, and everything came out of me. Visions pored up my throat and past voices surrounded me. The sky listened. The city didn't. I didn't care. All I cared about was that I was howling so that I could hear my voice and so I would remember that the boy had intensity and something to offer. I howled, oh, so loud and desperate, telling a world that I was here and I wouldn't lie down.

Disbelief held me down inside my footsteps, making my body heavy but my heart wild.

I walked home, seeing all my doubt from the other side. Have you ever seen that? Like when you go on holiday. On the way back, everything is the same but it looks a little different than it did on the way. It's because you're seeing it backwards.

It is early, early morning. It's that time when it's still dark but you know the day is coming. Blue is bleeding through black. Stars are dying.

Well, have you even tried again? You can’t just sit around waiting for the new world to take it with you. You have to go out and be part of it - despite your past mistakes.

Usually we walk around constantly believing ourselves. "I'm okay" we say. "I'm alright". But sometimes the truth arrives on you and you can't get it off. That's when you realize that sometimes it isn't even an answer--it's a question. Even now, I wonder how much of my life is convinced.

A GUIDED TOUR OF SUFFERING: To your left, perhaps your right, perhaps even straight ahead, you find a small black room. In it sits a Jew. He is scum. He is starving. He is afraid. Please - try not to look away.

Maybe everyone can live beyond what they're capable of.

There are so many moments to remember and sometimes I think that maybe we're not really people at all. Maybe moments are what we are.... Sometimes I just survive. But sometimes I stand on the rooftop of my existence, arms stretched out, begging for more.

There was an itchy lung for a last cigarette and an immense, magnetic pull toward the basement, for the girl who was his daughter and was writing a book down there he hoped to read one day. Liesel. His soul whispered it as I carried him. But there was no Liesel in that house. Not for me, anyway.

She walked down the basement steps. She saw an imaginary framed photo seep into the wall - a quiet-smiled secret. No more than a few meters, it was a long walk to the drop sheets and the assortment of paint cans that shielded Max Vandenburg. She removed the sheets closest to the wall until there was a small corridor to look through. The first part of him she saw was his shoulder, and through the slender gap, she slowly, painfully, inched her hand in until it rested there. His clothing was cool. He did not wake.She could feel his breathing and his shoulder moving up and down ever so slightly. For a while, she watched him. Then she sat and leaned back.Sleepy air seemed to have followed her.The scrawled words of practice stood magnificently on the wall by the stairs, jagged and childlike and sweet. They looked on as both the hidden Jew and the girl slept, hand to shoulder.They breathed.German and Jewish lungs.

If I ever leave this place-I'll make sure I'm better HERE first.

Papa!” she whispered. “I have no eyes!”He patted the girl’s hair. She’d fallen into his trap. “With a smile like that,” Hans Hubermann said, “you don’t need eyes.

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.

How could she ever know that someone would pick her story up and carry it with him everywhere?