Top 500 Markus Zusak Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “We all have our duties here. We all suffer. We all endure our setbacks for the greater good of mankind.”

— Markus Zusak

302. “Now I’ve changed things. I’ve left my own fingerprints on the world, no matter how small, and it’s upset the equilibrium of us.”

— Markus Zusak

303. “My soul needs yours.”

— Markus Zusak

304. “If you feel like it, come with me. I will tell you a story. I’ll show you something.”

— Markus Zusak

305. “There were not many people who could say that their education had been paid for with cigarettes.”

— Markus Zusak

306. “I certainly wasn’t born with creative writing. Maybe there’s a certain amount of learning and then it’s up to the person. I think in the end it’s your favourite books that are the best teachers. That’s the way I’ve learned the most, by far.”

— Markus Zusak

307. “I actually feel quite self-indulgent at the moment, telling you all about me, me, me. My travels, what I saw in ’42. On the other hand, you’re a human – you should understand self-obsession.”

— Markus Zusak

308. “Her fingertips are made of love. When she speaks, her voice is made of love.”

— Markus Zusak

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

— Markus Zusak

310. “Stealing it, in a sick kind of sense, was like earning it.”

— Markus Zusak

311. “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.”

— Markus Zusak

312. “The pages and the words are my world, spread out before your eyes and for your hand to touch. Vaguely, I can see you face looking down into me, as I look back. Do you see my eyes?”

— Markus Zusak

313. “God never says anything. You think you’re the only one he never answers?”

— Markus Zusak

314. “It kind of depressed me to think a human could be so lonely that she would comfort herself with the company of appliances that whistle, and sit alone to eat.”

— Markus Zusak

315. “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.”

— Markus Zusak

316. “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.”

— Markus Zusak

317. “We skip the moments like stones.”

— Markus Zusak

318. “Snowflakes of ash fell so lovelily you were tempted to stretch out your tongue to catch them, taste them. Only, they would have scorched your lips. They would have cooked your mouth.”

— Markus Zusak

319. “The beauty of my work is that my sets cost nothing. That’s what I love about being a writer of novels.”

— Markus Zusak

320. “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.”

— Markus Zusak

321. “When her hands reached out and poured the tea, it was as if she also poured something into me while I sat there sweating in my cab. It was like she held a string and pulled on it just slightly to open me up. She got in, put a piece of herself inside me, and left again.”

— Markus Zusak

322. “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?”

— Markus Zusak

323. “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.”

— Markus Zusak

324. “The last thing I wanted was to look down at the stranded face of my teenager. A pretty girl. Her whole death was now ahead of her.”

— Markus Zusak

325. “But neither of us knows, because a fight’s worth nothing if you know from the start that you’re going to win it.”

— Markus Zusak

326. “Crowds of questions stream through me like lines of people exiting a soccer ground or a concert. They push and shove and trip. Some make their way around. Some remain in their seats, waiting for their opportunity.”

— Markus Zusak

327. “He’d probably say that he was exercising his God-given right to stupidity.”

— Markus Zusak

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

— Markus Zusak

329. “Outside is dark. The kitchen light is loud. It deafens me as I walk towards it.”

— Markus Zusak

330. “Very suddenly. Yes, quite suddenly, I didn’t feel like I could handle my feeling of aloneness.”

— Markus Zusak

331. “She enjoyed the small fragments of pain.”

— Markus Zusak

332. “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.”

— Markus Zusak

333. “The buildings appear to be glued together, mostly small houses and apartment blocks that looked nervous. There is murky snow spread out like carpet. There is concrete, empty hat-stand trees, and gray air.”

— Markus Zusak

334. “I’m compelled to continue on, because although it’s not true for every person on earth, it’s true for the vast majority – that death waits for no man – and if he does, he doesn’t usually wait very long.”

— Markus Zusak

335. “Living in Sydney, I’ve taken the chance to start surfing again. One of my best memories of growing up is catching my first proper wave and surfing across it and my brother cheering at me from the shore.”

— Markus Zusak

336. “The juggling comes to an end now, but the struggling does not. I have Liesel Meminger in one hand, Max Vandenburg in the other. Soon I will clap them together. Just give me a few pages.”

— Markus Zusak

337. “Again, Himmel Street was a trail of people, and again, Papa left his accordion. Rosa reminded him to take it, but he refused. ‘I didn’t take it last time,’ he explained, ‘and we lived.’ War clearly blurred the distinction between logic and superstition.”

— Markus Zusak

338. “What good are the words?”

— Markus Zusak

339. “If nothing else, they died fast and they were warm. The boy from the plane, I thought. The one with the teddy bear. Where was Rudy’s confort? Where was someone to alleviate this robbery of his life? Who was there to soothe him as life’s rug was snatched from under his sleeping feet?”

— Markus Zusak

340. “I s’pose, I can’t have it all my own way, can I? You can’t drown in a person unless they let you.”

— Markus Zusak

341. “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.”

— Markus Zusak

342. “I don’t really know that this story has a whole lot of things happen in it. It doesn’t really. It’s just a record of how things were in my life during this last winter. I guess things happened, but nothing out of the ordinary.”

— Markus Zusak

343. “For at least twenty minutes she handed out the story. The youngest kids were soothed by her voice, and everyone else saw visions of the whistler running from the scene. Liesel did not. The book thief saw only the mechanics of the words – their bodies stranded on the paper, beaten down for her to walk on. Somewhere, too, in the gaps between a period and the next capital letter, there was also Max. She remembered reading to him when he was sick. It he in the basement? she wondered. Or is he stealing a glimpse of the sky again?”

— Markus Zusak

344. “We both laugh and run and the moment is so thick around me that i feel like dropping into it to let it carry me.”

— Markus Zusak

345. “Yes, I’m often reminded of her, and in one of my array of pockets, I have kept her story to retell. It is one of the small legion I carry, each one extraordinary in its own right. Each one an attempt – an immense leap of an attempt – to prove to me that you, and your human existence, are worth it.”

— Markus Zusak

346. “It was like she held a string and pulled on it just slightly to open me up. She got in, put a piece of herself inside me, and left again. In there, somewhere, I still feel it.”

— Markus Zusak

347. “Make no mistake, the woman had a heart. She had a bigger one that people would think. There was a lot in it, stored up, high in miles of hidden shelving. Remember that she was the woman with the instrument strapped to her body in the long, moon-slit night.”

— Markus Zusak

348. “It’s funny how when you watch people from a long distance, it all seems voiceless. It’s like watching a silent movie. You guess what people say. You watch their mouths move and imagine the sounds of their feet hitting the ground. You wonder what they’re talking about and, even more so, what they might be thinking.”

— Markus Zusak

349. “You don’t shoot a dog when it is already dead.”

— Markus Zusak

350. “I looked at myself in that window, oblivious to all the people around me and I stared and smiled that particular smile. You know that smile that seems to knock you and tell you how pathetic you are? That’s the smile I was smiling.”

— Markus Zusak