Quotes from Markus Zusak

You can kill a man with those words. No gun. No bullets. Just words and a girl.

My arms are killing me. I didn't know words could be so heavy.

I like that every page in every book can have a gem on it. It's probably what I love most about writing—that words can be used in a way that's like a child playing in a sandpit, rearranging things, swapping them around. They're the best moments in a day of writing—when an image appears that you didn't know would be there when you started work in the morning.

I'm not the messenger at all. I'm the message.

one opportunity leads directly to another, just as risk leads to more risk, life to more life, and death to more death.

If they killed him tonight, at least he would die alive.

It's hard to not like a man who not only notices the colors, but speaks them.

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

I think she ate a salad and some soup. And loneliness. She ate that, too.

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.

She said it out loud, the words distributed into a room that was full of cold air and books. Books everywhere! Each wall was armed with overcrowded yet immaculate shelving. It was barely possible to see paintwork. There were all different styles and sizes of lettering on the spines of the black, the red, the gray, the every-colored books. It was one of the most beautiful things Liesel Meminger had ever seen. With wonder, she smiled. That such a room existed!

Only in today's sick society can a man be persecuted for reading too many books.

I... He struggled to answer. When everything was quiet, I went up to the corridor and the curtain in the livingroom was open just a crack... I could see outside. I watched, only for a few seconds. He had not seen the outside world for twenty-two months. There was no anger or reproach. It was Papa who spoke. How did it look? Max lifted his head, with great sorrow and great astonishment. There were stars, he said. They burned by eyes.

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

Goodbye, Papa, you saved me. You taught me to read. No one can play like you. I'll never drink champagne. No one can play like you. -Liesel

Please, trust me, I most definitely can be cheerful. I can be amiable. Agreeable. Affable. And that's only the A's. Just don't ask me to be nice. Nice has nothing to do with me.

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

A book floated down the Amper River. A boy jumped in, caught up to it, and held it in his right hand. He grinned. He stood waist-deep in the icy, Decemberish water. "How about a kiss, Saumensch?" he said.

People die of broken hearts. They have heart attacks. And it's the heart that hurts most when things go wrong and fall apart.

Sometimes I think my papa is an accordion. When he looks at me and smiles and breathes, I hear the notes.

Five hundred souls. I carried them in my fingers, like suitcases. Or I'd throw them over my shoulder. It was only the the children I carried in my arms.

If a guy like you can stand up and do what you did, then maybe everyone can. Maybe everyone can live beyond what they're capable of.

When she came to write her story, she would wonder when the books and the words started to mean not just something, but everything.

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