All told, she owned fourteen books, but she saw her story as being made up predominantly of ten of them. Of those ten, six were stolen, one showed up at the kitchen table, two were made for her by a hidden Jew, and one was delivered by a soft, yellow-dressed afternoon.

— Markus Zusak

And I can promise you something, because it was a thing I saw many years later - a vision in the book thief herself - that as she knelt next to Hans Hubermann, she watched him stand and play the accordion. He stood and strapped it on in the alps of broken houses and played the accordion with kindness silver eyes and even a cigarette slouched on his lips. The bellows breathed, and the tall man played for Liesel Reminder one last time as the sky was slowly taken away from her.

— Markus Zusak

... And the boy whose hair remained the color of lemons forever.

— Markus Zusak

And then there's the sickness I feel from looking at legs I can't touch, or at lips that don't smile at me. Or hips that don't reach for me. And hearts that don't beat for me.

— Markus Zusak

And when we finally stood up and turned to face the world, I could feel something climbing through me. I could feel it on its hands and knees inside me, rising up, rising up - and I smiled. I smiled, thinking, The hunger, because I knew it all too well. The hunger. The desire. Then, slowly, as we walked on, I felt the beauty of it, and I could taste it, like words inside my mouth.

— Markus Zusak

And you're Cameron Wolfe. That' gotta start meaning somethin' boy. That's gotta start churnin' inside us, making us want to be someone for those names, and not just another couple of guys who amounted to nothin' but what people said we would. No way. We're getting' out of that. We have to. Furthermore, we're going to crawl and moan and fight and bite and bark at anything that gets in our way or tries to hunt us down and shoot us. All right?

— Markus Zusak

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

— Markus Zusak

As always, one of her books was next to her.

— Markus Zusak

As always, she was carrying the washing. Rudy was carrying two buckets of cold water, or as he put it, two buckets of future ice.

— Markus Zusak

A small but noteworthy note. I've seen so many young men over the years who think they're running at other young men. They are not. They are running at me.

— Markus Zusak