Markus Zusak Quotes

I told her about school and how I sat on a wall there and felt stories and words move through me ...

~ Markus Zusak

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 rain.

~ Markus Zusak

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.

~ Markus Zusak

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.

~ Markus Zusak

I have hated the words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right. - Liesel Meminger

~ Markus Zusak

If your eyes could speak, what would they say?

~ Markus Zusak

Very quickly, very suddenly, words fell through my mind. They landed on the floor of my thoughts, an in there, down there, I started to pick the words up. They were excerpts of truth gathered from inside me. Even in the night, in bed, they woke me.They painted themselves onto the ceiling.They burned themselves onto the sheets of memory laid out in my mind.When I woke up the next day, I wrote the words down , on a torn-up piece of paper. And to me, the world changed color that morning.

~ Markus Zusak

He switched off the light, came back and sat in the chair. In the darkness, Liesel kept her eyes open. She was watching the words.

~ Markus Zusak

Trust was accumulated quickly, due primarily to the brute strength of the man's gentleness, his thereness. (p.36)

~ Markus Zusak

DEFINITION NOT FOUND IN THE DICTIONARY Not leaving: an act of trust and love, often deciphered by children

~ Markus Zusak

She took a step and didn't want to take any more, but she did.

~ Markus Zusak

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.

~ Markus Zusak

Often I wish this would all be over, Liesel, but then somehow you do something like walk down the basement steps with a snowman in your hands.

~ Markus Zusak

It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on, coughing and searching, and finding.

~ Markus Zusak

She was like a lone angel floating above the surface of the earth, laughing with delight because she could fly but crying out of loneliness.

~ Markus Zusak

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

~ Markus Zusak

See, I was never a guy who had a whole heap of friends to belong to. Besides Greg Fienni, I never really had friends. I kind of stayed on my own. I hated it, but I was proud of it too. Cameron Wolfe needed no one. He didn't need to be amongst a pack. Not all of us roam like that. No, all he needed was his instincts. All he needed was himself.

~ Markus Zusak

Have you ever noticed that idiots have a lot of friends? It's just an observation.

~ Markus Zusak

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.

~ Markus Zusak

Steve, on the other hand, has plenty of friends, but he wouldn't bleed for any of them, because he wouldn't trust them to bleed for him. In that way he's just as alone as me.

~ Markus Zusak

When I picked him up originally, the boy's spirit was soft and cold, like ice-cream. He started melting in my arms. Then warming up completely. Healing.

~ Markus Zusak

Keep going. You're a mess and you're happy.

~ Markus Zusak

The point is, Ilsa Hermann had decided to make suffering her triumph. When it refused to let go of her, she succumbed to it. She embraced it.

~ Markus Zusak

It would then be brought abruptly to an end, for the brightness had shown suffering the way.

~ Markus Zusak

a young man was hung by a rope made of Stalingrad snow

~ Markus Zusak

I've wandered through the real world, and written myself through the darkness of the streets inside me. I see people walking through the city and wonder where they've been, and what the moments of their lives have done to them. If they're anything like me, their moments have held them up and shot them down.Sometimes I just survive.But sometimes I stand on the rooftop of my existence, arms stretched out, begging for more.That's when the stories show up in me.They find me all the time.They're made of underdogs and fighters. They're made of hunger and desire and trying to live decent.The only trouble is, I don't know which of those stories comes first.Maybe they all just merge into one.We'll see, I guess.I'll let you know when I decide.

~ Markus Zusak

The impoverished always try to keep moving, as if relocating might help.

~ Markus Zusak

You’ll have days of complete lack of faith in your abilities. But you have to keep coming back. That’s when you know you’re a writer – when you take the failures and appear at the desk again, over and over again.

~ Markus Zusak

...to swear with a ferocity that can only be described as a talent.

~ Markus Zusak

That’s when I have to ask him. “Can you really talk like that? Being holy and all?”“What? Because I’m a priest?” He finishes the dregs of his coffee. “Sure. God knows what’s important.

~ Markus Zusak

He was skinny with soft hair, and his thick, murky eyes watched as the stranger played one more song in the heavy room. From face to face, he looked on as the man played and the woman wept. The different notes handled her eyes. Such sadness.

~ Markus Zusak

He was the second snowman to be melting away before her eyes, only this one was different. It was a paradox. The colder he became, the more he melted.

~ Markus Zusak

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

~ Markus Zusak

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

~ Markus Zusak

... 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.

~ Markus Zusak

You should know it yourself- a young man is still a boy, and a boy sometimes has the right to be stubborn.

~ Markus Zusak

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

~ Markus Zusak

That was when the world wasn't so big and I could see everywhere. It was when my father was a hero and not a human.

~ Markus Zusak

We are wolves, which are wild dogs, and this is our place in the city. We are small and our house is small on our small urban street. We can see the city and the train line and it's beautiful in its own dangerous way. Dangerous because it's shared and taken and fought for.That's the best way I can put it, and thinking about it, when I walk past the tiny houses on our street, I wonder about the stories inside them. I wonder hard, because houses must have walls and rooftops for a reason. My only query is the windows. Why do they have windows? Is it to let a glimpse of the world in? Or for us to see out?

~ Markus Zusak

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.

~ Markus Zusak