Quotes from Markus Zusak

I loved you already then.

My own eyes try to sleep, but they don't. They stay wide awake as time snarls forward and silence drops down, like measured thought.

She was the book thief without the words. Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like the rain.

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?

I say, 'Don't lose your heart, Rube.' And very clearly, without moving, my brother answers me. He says, 'I'm not tryin' to lose it, Cam. I'm tryin' to find it.

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

I'd seen glimpses of a different me. It was a different me because in those increments of time I thought I actually became a winner. The truth, however, is painful. It was a truth that told me with a scratching internal brutality that I was me, and that winning wan't natural for me. It had to be fought for, in the echoes and trodden footprints of my mind. In a way, I had to scavenge for moments of alrightness.

Very quickly, very suddenly, words fell through my mind. They landed on the floor of my thoughts, and in there, down there, I started to pick the words up. They were excerpts of truth gathered from inside me.

For a moment, I debated whether I should tell someone about the words I'd started writing down, but I couldn't. In a way, I felt ashamed, even though my writing was the one thing that whispered okayness in my ear. I didn't speak it, to anyone.

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.

Lua and Marie are holding hands. They look like they're so happy, just inside this moment, watching the kids and the lights on their old fibro house. Lua kisses her. Just softly on the lips. And she kisses back. Sometimes people are beautiful. Not in looks. Not in what they say. Just in what they are.

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.

His eyes did not do anything that shock normally describes. No snapping, no slapping, no jolt. Those things happen when you wake from a bad dream, not when you wake into one.

As if sensing the oncoming theatre, the pigeons arrived from nowhere, and dug in close on the powerlines. They were perched on TV aerials, and, God forbid, on the trees. There was also a single crow, fat-feathered and plump, like a pigeon disguised in a trench coat.

He's most likely robbing the bank as a paycheck on the world for winning the ugliness prize at his local fete three years running.

Entonces, ¿se es cobarde por sentir miedo? ¿Se es cobarde por alegrarse de seguir vivo?

The first couple of times, he simply stayed - a stranger to kill the aloneness. A few nights after that, he whispered "Shhh, I'm here, its alright." After three weeks, he held her. Trust was accumulated quickly, due primarily to the brute strength of the man's gentleness, his thereness.

In the basement of 33 Himmel Street, Max Vandenburg could feel the fists of an entire nation. One by one they climbed into the ring to beat him down. They made him bleed. They let him suffer. Millions of them--until one last time, when he gathered himself to his feet...

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.

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.

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.

I'm twenty years old and look at me-- there isn't a thing I want to do

On the other hand, you're a human--you should understand self-obsession.

If I'm ever going to be okay, I'll have to earn it.