Top 412 Quotes & Sayings by Markus Zusak - Page 3

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

It's not the place, I think. It's the people. We'd have all been the same anywhere else.

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.

When she faced the noise, she found the mayor’s wife in a brand-new bathrobe and slippers. On the breast pocket of the robe sat an embroidered swastika. Propaganda even reached the bathroom.

I want to talk to him. I want to ask him about that girl and if he loved her and still misses her. Nothing, however, exits my mouth. How well do we really let ourselves know each other? There's a long quietness until I finally break it open. It reminds me of someone breaking bread and handing it out. In my case, I hand out a question to my friend.

Liesel shrugged away entirely from the crowd and entered the tide of Jews, weaving through them till she grabbed hold of his arm with her left hand. His face fell on her. It reached down as she tripped, and the Jew,the nasty Jew, helped her up. It took all of his strength.

She rubbed her eyes, and after a long study of his face, she spoke "Is it really you?" Is it from your cheek, she thought, that I took the seed? The man nodded. His heart wobbled and he held tighter to the branches. It is.

How'd it feel?" Rube asked himself. "I don't know exactly, but it made me want to howl.

Humans have a talent for escalation. -Death

At first, she could not talk. Perhaps it was the sudden bumpiness of love she felt for him. Or had she always loved him?

She was saying goodbye and she didn't even know it.

As she watched all of this, Liesel was certain that these were the poorest souls alive. That's what she wrote about them . . . Some looked appealingly at those who had come to observe their humiliation, this prelude to their deaths. Others pleaded for someone, anyone to step forward and catch them in their arms. No one did.

It was one of those moments of perfect tiredness, of having conquered not only the work at hand, but the night who had blocked the way.

A SMALL PIECE OF TRUTH I do not carry a sickle or scythe. I only wear a hooded black robe when it's cold. And I don't have those skull-like facial features you seem to enjoy pinning on me from a distance. You want to know what I truly look like? I'll help you out. Find yourself a mirror while I continue.

How does it feel, anyway?" How does what feel?" When you take one of those books?" At that moment, she chose to keep still. If he wants an answer, he'd have to come back, and he did. "Well?" he asked, but again, it was the boy who replied, before Liesel could even open her mouth. It feels good, doesn't it? To steal something back.

The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn't be any of this.

***A Last note from your narrator*** I am haunted by humans.

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.

The water crumbles on it's way down as my hands and feet push me forward. The world is lightening, taking shape, and turning to color. It feels like it's being painted around me.

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

***A KEY WORD*** Imagined

Clearly, I see it. I was just about to leave when I found her kneeling there. A mountain range of rubble was written, designed, erected around her. She was clucthing at a book.

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

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.

His soul sat up. It met me. Those kinds of souls always do - the best ones. The ones who rise up and say "I know who you are and I am ready. Not that I want to go, of course, but I will come." Those souls are always light because more of them have been put out. More of them have already found their way to other places.

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

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

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.

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

One was a book thief. The other stole the sky.

The orange flames waved at the crowd as paper and print dissolved inside them. Burning words were torn from their sentences.

The question is what color will everything be at that moment when I come for you? What will the sky be saying?

Grimly, she realized that clocks don't make a sound that even remotely resembles ticking, tocking. It was more the sound of a hammer, upside down, hacking methodically at the earth. It was the sound of a grave.

The conversation of bullets.

The bittersweetness of uncertainty: To win or to lose.

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

There was sex, of course. Nakedness. Wall to wall, in and out of my thoughts. But when it was over it was her whispering voice I craved, and a human curled up in my arms.

The best word shakers were the ones who understood the true power of words. They were the ones who could climb the highest.

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

I'd rather chase the sun than wait for it.

At first, all is black and white. Black on white. That's where I'm walking, through pages. These pages. Sometimes it gets so that I have one foot in the pages and the words, and the other in what they speak of.

I love and hate this place because it is full of words.

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

You cannot be afraid, Read the book. Smile at it. It's a great book-the greatest book you've ever read.

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

Even death has a heart.

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

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

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

Winning wasn't natural for me. It had to be fought for, in the echoes and trodden footprints of my mind.

They were French, they were Jews, and they were you.

The last time I saw her was red. The sky was like soup, boiling and stirring. In some places, it was burned. There were black crumbs, and pepper, streaked across the redness.

It's a lot easier, she realized, to be on the verge of something than to actually be it. This would still take time.

When I was a teenager I decided I was going to be a writer and that nothing was going to stop me. It sounds almost villainous. But I knew that was what I wanted.

All my friends seem to be smart arses. Don't ask me why. Like many things, it is what it is.

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.

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.

There was also a rumor that later in the day, she walked fully clothed into the Amper River and said something very strange. Something about a kiss. Something about a Saumensch. How many times did she have to say goodbye?

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

A happening was looming. It was out there somewhere beyond the regular enclosed life that I had been living. It was out there, not waiting, but existing. Being. Perhaps it was only slightly wondering if I would come to it.