Top 500 Markus Zusak Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “I guess if editing doesn’t hurt, you’re probably not doing it properly. I find it quite difficult. The hardest part is believing that it’s actually working and getting rid of the doubt that always creeps in.”

— Markus Zusak

352. “I am in all truthfulness attempting to be cheerful about this whole topic, though most people find themselves hindered in believing me, no matter my protestations. 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.”

— Markus Zusak

353. “There are hundreds of thoughts per every word spoken, and that’s if they’re spoken at all.”

— Markus Zusak

354. “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.”

— Markus Zusak

355. “The happening that happened was that I met this girl...”

— Markus Zusak

356. “There was rain like a ghost you could walk through. Almost dry when it hit the ground.”

— Markus Zusak

357. “Soon evening worked its way into the sky, and the city hunched itself down.”

— Markus Zusak

358. “When we move apart, she looks at me again, till a small tear lifts itself up in her eye. It trips out to find a wrinkle and follows it down.”

— Markus Zusak

359. “The days and nights come apart. I feel them corroding at the seams.”

— Markus Zusak

360. “I tried not to sleep because I was afraid of who might be there when I woke up.”

— Markus Zusak

361. “Me, I’m known for bruises and levelheadedness, for height and muscle and blasphemy, and the occasional sentimentality.”

— Markus Zusak

362. “I notice a deliberate change in my brother. He’s harder. He has a switch, and once a fight comes near, he flicks it and he is no longer my brother Rube. He’s a machine.”

— Markus Zusak

363. “I read some books that were the right books for me. I read them and I didn’t even notice turning the pages anymore. I thought, “That’s what I want to do with my life.””

— Markus Zusak

364. “When I found it amongst the book thief’s words, I realised that we passed each other once in a while during that period, though neither of us scheduled a meeting. Personally, I had a lot of work to do. As for Hans, I think he was doing his best to avoid me.”

— Markus Zusak

365. “It makes me think of my life, my nonexistent accomplishments and my overall abilities in incompetence.”

— Markus Zusak

366. “Around us I can sniff out a savagery in the noisy southern air. It knifes it’s way into my nose, but I do not bleed blood. It’s fear I bleed, and it gushes out over my lip. I wipe it away, in a hurry.”

— Markus Zusak

367. “I only know that all of those people would have sensed me that night, excluding the youngest of the children. I was the suggestion. I was the advice, my imagined feet walking into the kitchen and down the corridor.”

— Markus Zusak

368. “But sometimes the truth arrives on you, and you can’t get it off. That’s when you realize that sometimes it isn’t even an answer – it’s a question.”

— Markus Zusak

369. “Just be patient, she told herself, and with the mounting pages, the strength of her writing fist grew.”

— Markus Zusak

370. “She even touches Jimmy’s face on the photos, and I see what it is to love someone like Milla loved that man. Her fingertips are made of love.”

— Markus Zusak

371. “Stealing is what the army does. Taking your father, and mine.”

— Markus Zusak

372. “I wanted to drown inside a woman in the feeling and drooling of the love I could give her. I wanted her pulse to crush me with its intensity. That’s what I wanted. That’s what I wanted myself to be.”

— Markus Zusak

373. “He loved her more than Michelangelo.”

— Markus Zusak

374. “I’d been in love with her for years. I never left this suburban town. I didn’t go to university. I went to Audrey.”

— Markus Zusak

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

— Markus Zusak

376. “Nothing affects you, and you affect nothing.”

— Markus Zusak

377. “A few of them performed the beautiful childhood art of snickering.”

— Markus Zusak

378. “But when they laugh, you can see the world in their eyes.”

— Markus Zusak

379. “She did not say goodbye. She was incapable, and after a few more minutes at his side, she was able to tear herself from the ground. 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

380. “One of the best things about her was that she actually acknowledged my existence.”

— Markus Zusak

381. “In the darkness of my dark-beating heart, I know. He’d have loved it, all right.”

— Markus Zusak

382. “Personally, I like a chocolate-covered sky. Dark, dark chocolate. People say it suits me. I do, however, try to enjoy every color I see – the whole spectrum. A billion or so flavors, none of them quite the same, and a sky to slowly suck on. It takes the edge off the stress. It helps me relax.”

— Markus Zusak

383. “Things always seem to glide away. They come to you, stay a moment, then leave again.”

— Markus Zusak

384. “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.”

— Markus Zusak

385. “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.”

— Markus Zusak

386. “She leaned down and looked at his lifeless face and Liesel kissed her best friend, Rudy Steiner, soft and true on his lips. He tasted dusty and sweet. H tasted like regret in the shadows of trees and in the glow of the anarchist’s suit collection. She kissed him long and soft, and when she pulled herself away, her lips were fleshy, and she leaned in once more, this time losing control and misjudging it. Their teeth collided on the demolished world of Himmel Street.”

— Markus Zusak

387. “Yet each day, he managed to unravel and straighten himself, disgusted and thankful. Wrecked, but somehow not torn into pieces.”

— Markus Zusak

388. “I’m not one of these ‘the characters write themselves; the story just fell out of me’ kind of writers. Wish it was like that.”

— Markus Zusak

389. “I love the laughter of this night. 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. For now, just let us run. We run straight through the laughter of the night.”

— Markus Zusak

390. “She had her whole death ahead of her.”

— Markus Zusak

391. “There was no recovery from what had happened. That would take decades; it would take a long life.”

— Markus Zusak

392. “Are you looking at a dead man now?”

— Markus Zusak

393. “He was caught somewhere, in the current – of destroying everything he had, to become all he needed to be.”

— Markus Zusak

394. “The stars set fire to my eyes.”

— Markus Zusak

395. “She laughed and he felt her breath, and he thought about that warmness, how people were warm like that, from inside to out; how it could hit you and disappear, then back again, and nothing was ever permanent –.”

— Markus Zusak

396. “Can a wolfe be beautiful?”

— Markus Zusak

397. “That’s the beauty of books. In so many ways, they never really end.”

— Markus Zusak

398. “She slept a lot and didn’t dream, and on most occasions she was sorry to wake up. Everything disappeared when she was asleep.”

— Markus Zusak

399. “Don’t think, I told myself. Think nothingness. But even nothingness was something. It was a thought.”

— Markus Zusak

400. “How’d it feel?” Rube asked himself. “I don’t know exactly, but it made me want to howl.”

— Markus Zusak