The only thing worse than a boy who hates you: a boy that loves you.
He does something to me, that boy. Every time. It’s his only detriment. He steps on my heart. He makes me cry.
A DEFINITION NOT FOUND IN THE DICTIONARY Not leaving: an act of trust and love,often deciphered by children
If only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter.
Sometimes people are beautiful.Not in looks.Not in what they say.Just in what they are.
Maybe everyone can live beyond what they’re capable of.
I want words at my funeral. But I guess that means you need life in your life.
Can a person steal happiness? Or is just another internal, infernal human trick?
Why can’t the world hear? I ask myself. Within a few moments I ask it many times. Because it doesn’t care, I finally answer, and I know I’m right. It’s like I’ve been chosen. But chosen for what? I ask.
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.
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.
Together, they would watch everything that was so carefully planned collapse, and they would smile at the beauty of destruction.
It was a year for the ages, like 79, like 1346, to name just a few. Forget the scythe, Goddamn it, I needed a broom or a mop. And I needed a vacation.
A halo surrounded the grim reaper nun, Sister Maria. (By the way-I like this human idea of the grim reaper. I like the scythe. It amuses me.)
… And the boy whose hair remained the color of lemons forever.
If they killed him tonight, at least he would die alive.
for some reason, dying men always ask the question they know the answer to. perhaps it’s so they can die being right.
Grimly, she realized that clocks don’t make a sound that even remotely resembles ticking, tocking. It was more the sound of a hammer, upside down, hacking methodically at the earth. It was the sound of a grave.
Papa was a man with silver eyes, not dead ones. Papa was an accordion! But his bellows were all empty. Nothing went in and nothing came out.
Still, they have one thing I envy. Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die.
It felt as though the whole globe was dressed in snow. Like it has pulled it on, the way you pull on a sweater. Next to the train line, footprints were sunken to their shins. Trees wore blankets of ice. As you may expect, someone has died.
How do you tell if something’s alive? You check for breathing.
Death waits for no man – and if he does, he doesn’t usually wait for very long.
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.
The scribbled signature black, onto the blinding global white, onto the thick soupy red.
For two days I went about my business. I travelled the globe as always, handing souls to the conveyor belt of eternity.
Could she smell my breath? Could she hear my cursed circular heart beat revolving like the crime it is in my deathly chest?
Even now, I wonder how much of my life is convinced.
…there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.
That’s typically what writers do; we just sit around complaining most of the time. And the better things are going, the more they complain.
She wanted none of those days to end, and it was always with disappointment that she watched the darkness stride forward.
It’s funny, don’t you think, how time seems to do a lot of things? It flies, it tells, and worst of all, it runs out.
It makes me wonder, Do we spend most of our days trying to remember or forget things? Do we spend most of our time running towards or away from our lives? I don’t know.
It is early, early morning. It’s that time when it’s still dark but you know the day is coming. Blue is bleeding through black. Stars are dying.
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.
Time will tell, I suppose, or at least, these pages will.
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.
Best friends one, and now we have almost nothing to say to each other. It was interesting, how he had joined those guys and I just stayed on my own. I didn’t like it or dislike it. It was just funny that things had turned out that way.
My arms are killing me. I didn’t know words could be so heavy.
The point is, it didn’t really matter what the book was about. It was what it meant that was important.
The book thief has struck for the first time – the beginning of an illustrious career.
I guess that’s the beauty of books. When they finish they don’t really finish.
The paper landed on the table, but the news was stapled to his chest. A tattoo.
I could smell something. Fear.I could taste it now.It tasted like blood in my mouth, and I could feel it slide through me and open me up when I saw him …
I watched the sky as it turned from silver to grey to the colour of rain. Even the clouds tried to look the other way.
A snowball in the face is surely the perfect beginning to a lasting friendship.
When finally she finished and stood herself up, he put his arm around her, best-buddy style, and they walked on. There was no request for a kiss. Nothing like that. You can love Rudy for that, if you like.
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.
July 24, 6:03 A.M.The laundry was warm and the rafters were firm, and Michael Holzapfel jumped from the chair as if it were a cliff…Michael Holzapfel knew what he was doing. He killed himself for wanting to live.
The Hubbermanns had two of their own (children), but they were older and had moved out…Soon they would be both in the war. One would be making bullets. The other would be shooting them.
It’s much easier . . . to be on the verge of something than to actually be it. This would still take time.
A couple of them were school beauty-queen pretty while a few were that more real-looking type. A realer kind of pretty.
… none of them had it. They had no qualms about stealing, but they needed to be told. They liked to be told, and Viktor Chemmel liked to be the teller. It was a nice microcosm.
I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that’s where they begin. Their great skills is their capacity to escalate.
I don’t have much interest in building mystery. Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It’s the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me.
Imagine smiling after a slap in the face. Then think of doing it twenty-four hours a day.
Rosa Hubermann was sitting on the edge of the bed with her husband’s accordion tied to her chest. Her fingers hovered above the keys. She did not move. She didn’t ever appear to be breathing.
Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die.
Somewhere, far down, there was an itch in his heart, but he made it a point not to scratch it. He was afraid of what might come leaking out.
Disbelief held me down inside my footsteps, making my body heavy but my heart wild.
Because you don’t learn anything unless you can find the patience to read. TV takes that away from you. It robs you from your mind.
… I felt something and vowed that if I ever got a girl I would treat her right and never be bad or dirty to her or hurt her, ever. I vowed it and had all the confidence in the world that I would keep the vow.
Well, have you even tried again? You can’t just sit around waiting for the new world to take it with you. You have to go out and be part of it – despite your past mistakes.
Ed?” Ritchie says later. We’re still standing in the water. “There’s only one thing I want.””What’s that, Ritchie?”His answer is simple.”To want.
the threat of Jewish competition was taken away, but so were the Jewish customers
a young man is still a boy, and a boy sometimes has the right to be stubborn.
I love and hate this place because it is full of words.
The words. Why did they have to exist? Without them, there wouldn’t be any of this.
The orange flames waved at the crowd as paper and print dissolved inside them. Burning words were torn from their sentences.
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?
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.
I told her about school and how I sat on a wall there and felt stories and words move through me …
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.
She couldn’t tell exactly where the words came from. What mattered was that they reached her. They arrived and kneeled next to her bed.
I have hated the words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right. – Liesel Meminger
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.
Trust was accumulated quickly, due primarily to the brute strength of the man’s gentleness, his thereness. (p.36)
DEFINITION NOT FOUND IN THE DICTIONARY Not leaving: an act of trust and love, often deciphered by children
She took a step and didn’t want to take any more, but she did.
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.
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.
It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on, coughing and searching, and finding.
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.
All my friends seem to be smart arses. Don’t ask me why. Like many things, it is what it is.
Have you ever noticed that idiots have a lot of friends? It’s just an observation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It would then be brought abruptly to an end, for the brightness had shown suffering the way.
a young man was hung by a rope made of Stalingrad snow
The impoverished always try to keep moving, as if relocating might help.
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.
…to swear with a ferocity that can only be described as a talent.
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.
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.
If I ever leave this place-I’ll make sure I’m better HERE first.
The only people we want to blame are ourselves, because it will be ourselves that we rely upon.
… 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.
You should know it yourself- a young man is still a boy, and a boy sometimes has the right to be stubborn.
The thing is, I don’t even hate cops. To tell you the truth, I actually feel a little sorry for them.
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.
Sometimes people are beautifulNot in looksNot in what they sayJust in what they are
I don’t want to stand in naked silence, pathetically unaware of how to be.
sometimes the human race likes to crank things up a little. They increase the production of bodies and their escaping souls.
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.
Sometimes you read a book so special that you want to carry it around with you for months after you’ve finished just to stay near it.
In the darkness of my dark-beating heart, I know. He’d have loved it, all right.
How could she ever know that someone would pick her story up and carry it with him everywhere?
He was waving. “Saukerl,” she laughed, and as she held up her hand, she knew completely that he was simultaneously calling her a Saumensch. I think that’s as close to love as eleven-year-olds can get.
There were thousands of households throughout that city and there was something happening in all of them. There was some kind of story in each, but self-contained. No one else knew. No one else cared.
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.
We used to languish when we walked, or sidle down the street like dogs that have just done something wrong. Now Rube walks upright, because he’s on the attack.
No matter how many times she was told that she was loved, there was no recognition that the proof was in the abandonment.
…one opportunity leads directly to another, just as risk leads to more risk, life to more life, and death to more death.
The sky is blue today, Max, and there is a big long cloud, and it’s stretched out, like a rope. At the end of it, the sun islike a yellow hole. . .
Make sure you live,’ she said. ‘As decent as you can. I know you’ll make mistakes, but sometimes you’re meant to, okay?
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.
Papa!” she whispered. “I have no eyes!”He patted the girl’s hair. She’d fallen into his trap. “With a smile like that,” Hans Hubermann said, “you don’t need eyes.
Max lifted his head, with great sorrow and great astonishment.’There were stars,’ He said. ‘They burned my eyes.’…from a Himmel street window, he wrote, the stars set fire to my eyes.
The night is alive with stars, and when I lie down and look up, I get lost up there. I feel like I’m falling, but upward, into the abyss of sky above me.
Their heartbeats fought each other, a mess of rhythm. Liesel tried to eat hers down. The taste of heart was not too cheerful.
One day, Liesel.’ he said, ‘you’ll be dying to kiss me.
I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.
The city was dark except for the building lights that seemed to appear like sores – like bandaids had been ripped off to expose the city’s skin.
It was one of those moments of perfect tiredness, of having conquered not only the work at hand, but the night who had blocked the way.
For at least twenty minutes, she handed out the story.
I deliberately seek out the colors to keep my mind off them, but now and then, I witness the ones who are left behind, crumbling among the jigsaw puzzle of realization, despair and surprise.
People observe the colors of a day at its beginnings and ends, but to me it’s quiet clear that a day merges through a multitude of shades and intonations, with each passing moment.
Right. That’s twenty-two fifty.””Twenty-two fifty?” We can’t hide our exasperation.”Well, yeah – this is a classy joint, you know.””That’s obvious – the service is incredible.
I’m always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both. Still, they have one thing I envy. Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die.
I actually feel quite self-indulgent at the moment, telling you all about me, me, me.(…) On the other hand, you’re a human -you should understand self obsession.
In years to come, he would be a giver of bread, not a stealer – proof again of the contradictory human being. So much good, so much evil. Just add water.
But then, is there cowardice in the acknowledgment of fear? Is there cowardice in being glad that you lived?
Whoever named Himmel Street certainly had a healthy sense of irony. Not that is was a living hell. It wasn’t. But is sure as hell wasn’t heaven, either.
If you can’t imagine it, think clumsy silence. Think bits and pieces of floating despair. And drowning in a train.
… because a fight’s worth nothing if you know from the start that you’re going to win it. It’s the ones in between that test you. They’re the ones that bring questions with them.
That paper–it sits there, open at the employment section. It sits there like a war, and each small advertisement is another trench for a person to dive into. To hope and fight in.
It was the beginning of the greatest Christmas ever. Little food. No presents. But there was a snowman in their basement.
I don’t leave a note.There’s nothing else to do. At first, I’d wanted to write Merry Christmas on the box somewhere, but I decide against it. This isn’t about words.It’s about glowing lights and small things that are big.
An eleven-year-old girl is many things, but she is not stupid.
If someone wanted to be a runner, you don’t tell them to think about running, you tell them to run. And the same simple idea applies to writing, I hope.
It’s not so much that the old friend is a better friend. It’s just that you know the person better, and you know they don’t really care if you’re acting like a poor, grovelling idiot. They know you would do the same for them.
Shadows of cloud lurked in the water, like holes the sun forgot about.
You might well ask just what the hell he was thinking. The answer is, probably nothing at all.He’d probably say he was exercising his God-given right to stupidity.
I wanted nothing for free.Nothing came for free at our place anyway.
You don’t always get what you wish for. Especially in Nazi Germany
The city buildings in the distance are holding up the sky, it seems.
The question is, what colour will everything be at that moment when I come for you? What will the sky be saying?
It’s lucky I was there. Then again, who am I kidding? I’m in most places at least once, and in 1943, I was just about everywhere.
It’s pathetic how a man can stand by and do nothing as a whole nation cleans out the garbage and makes itself great”-Hans Junior
One good punch from Rube on me would send the sky into my head and the clouds into my lungs. I just always tried to stay up.
Do you have to pay to be Jewish? Do you need a licence?
Awkward.That’s exactly how it was when we walked over to our sister and stood on each side of her, looking at her and feeling things and not knowing what to do.
There were people everywhere on the city street, but the stranger could not have been more alone if it were empty.
The impoverished always try to keep moving, as if relocating might help. They ignore the reality that a new version of the same old problem will be waiting at the end of the trip- the relative you cringe to kiss.
Stealing it, in a sick kind of sense, was like earning it.
The word maybe was beginning to annoy me, because the only thing that was fixed was that maybe would be with me forever.
Not a beauty queen. Not one of those. You know the ones. She was real.
I had to decide what I was going to do, and what I was going to be.I was standing there, waiting for someone to do something , till I realised the person I was waiting for was myself.
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.
The happening that happened was that I met this girl …
A small fact:You are going to die….does this worry you?
When you looked out my window you could see the whole city crouched under a blanket of car smog.
Failure has been my best friend as a writer. It tests you, to see if you have what it takes to see it through.