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 okayness in my ear. I didn't speak it, to anyone.

You should give it to Max, Liesel. See if you can leave it on the bedside table, like all the other things." Liesel watched him as if he'd gone insane. "How, though?" Lightly, he tapped her skull with his knuckles. "Memorize it. Then write it down for him.

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.

When you looked out my window you could see the whole city crouched under a blanket of car smog.

...there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.

Can a person steal happiness? Or is just another internal, infernal human trick?

Well, this is basically the end, so the answers should be in these next few pages. I doubt they will surprise you, but you never know. I don't know how smart or thick you are. You could be Albert Einstein for all I know, or some literary prizewinner, or maybe you're just middle of the road like me.

A small fact:You are going to die....does this worry you?

A final dirty joke.Another human punch line

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.

The happening that happened was that I met this girl ...

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 Milla'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.

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.

Not a beauty queen. Not one of those. You know the ones. She was real.

The word maybe was beginning to annoy me, because the only thing that was fixed was that maybe would be with me forever.

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

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.