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How do you tell if something's alive? You check for breathing.

Markus Zusak

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Markus Zusak
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: January 1
Novelist
Writer
Sydney
NSW
Checks
Breathing
Alive
Tell
Something
Check

More quotes by Markus Zusak

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The scrawled words of practice stood magnificently on the wall by the stairs, jagged and childlike and sweet. They looked on as both the hidden Jew and the girl slept, hand to shoulder. They breathed. German and Jewish lungs.
Markus Zusak
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I just know that right now, we want to be proud. For once. We want to take the struggle and rise above it. We want to frame it, live it, survive it. We want to put it in our mouths and taste it and never forget it, because it makes us strong.
Markus Zusak
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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
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The conversation of bullets.
Markus Zusak
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She was one if the few souls that made me wonder what's it to live.
Markus Zusak
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You don't always get what you wish for. Especially in Nazi Germany
Markus Zusak
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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
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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.
Markus Zusak
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… it was raining on Himmel Street when the world ended for Liesel Meminger. The sky was dripping. Like a tap that a child has tried its hardest to turn off but hasn’t quite managed.
Markus Zusak
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It was a Monday and they walked on a tightrope to the sun.
Markus Zusak
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I feel the fear, but I walk fast toward it.
Markus Zusak
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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.
Markus Zusak
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Competence was attractive.
Markus Zusak
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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
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I guess that’s the beauty of books. When they finish they don’t really finish.
Markus Zusak
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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.
Markus Zusak
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Or had she always loved him? It's likely. Restricted as she was from speaking, she wanted him to kiss her. She wanted him to drag her hand across and pull her over. It didn't matter where. Her mouth, her neck, her cheek. Her skin was empty for it, waiting.
Markus Zusak
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As a child in Sydney, my German Mum and my Austrian Dad would spontaneously tell me stories about what they saw and what they did as children. It was like a piece of Europe coming into our house... Those stories led me to my writing.
Markus Zusak
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Trust was accumulated quickly, due primarily to the brute strength of the man's gentleness, his thereness. (p.36)
Markus Zusak
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Shadows of cloud lurked in the water, like holes the sun forgot about.
Markus Zusak