Even death has a heart.

— Markus Zusak

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

— Markus Zusak

Failure has been my best friend as a writer. It tests you, to see if you have what it takes to see it through.

— Markus Zusak

For a good ten minutes or so we stand there with the flashlight burning the grave with light. The whole time, I'm trying to guess where and exactly how he died and, more to the point, realizing that poor old Mill's been without him for sixty-years. I can tell. No other man has entered her life. Not the way her Jimmy did. She's been waiting sixty years for Jimmy to come back. And now he has.

— 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 Führer 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

For a moment, I debated whether I should tell someone about the words I'd started writing down, but I couldn't. In a way, I felt ashamed, even though my writing was the one thing that whispered gayness in my ear. I didn't speak it, to anyone.

— Markus Zusak

For at least twenty minutes, she handed out the story.

— Markus Zusak

For some reason, dying men always ask they know the answer to. Perhaps it's so they can die being right.

— Markus Zusak

For two days I went about my business. I travelled the globe as always, handing souls to the conveyor belt of eternity.

— Markus Zusak

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

— Markus Zusak