Clearly, you’re an idiot but you’re our kind of idiot.
I laugh and the stars watch.
The moment is so thick around me that I feel like dropping into it to let it carry me. I love the laughter of this night.
When I glanced back at the plane, the pilot’s open mouth appeared to be smiling.
She did not say goodbye. She was incapable, and after a few more minutes at his side, she was able to tear herself from the ground. It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on, coughing and searching, and finding.
I wanted to tell the book thief many things, about beauty and brutality. But what could I tell her about those things that she didn’t already know? I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race – that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.
I think that’s as close to love as eleven-year-olds can get.
Quietly, he walked towards it with the matchbox in one hand, the candle in the other.
A family of ramshackle tragedy. A comic book kapow of boys and blood and beasts. We were born for relics like these.
She leaned down and looked at his lifeless face and Liesel kissed her best friend Rudy Steiner soft and true on his lips. He tasted dusty and sweet. He tasted like regret in the shadows of trees and in the glow of the anarchist’s suit collection.
It was a tradition for Frau Holtzapfel, one of their neighbors, to spit on the Hubermanns’ door every time she walked past. The front door was only meters from the gate, and let’s just say that Frau Holtzapfel had the distance – and the accuracy.
With the curtains clamped tight, he would sleep on the floor with a cushion beneath his head, as the fire slipped away and turned to ash. In the morning, he would return to the basement. A voiceless human. The Jewish rat, back to his hole.
They say that war is death’s best friend, but I must offer you a different point of view on that one. To me, war is like the new boss who expects the impossible.
I wonder if she’ll ever know that no one will love her as hard as I do.
When their bodies had finished scouring for gaps in the door, their souls rose up. Their fingernails had scratched at the wood and in some cases were nailed into it by the sheer force of desperation, and their spirits came towards me, into my arms.
I’m pretty much just hoping to live decent. I hope that’s enough.
His church is the old one at the edge of town, and I now realize why he’s chosen to live here. The church is too far away for him to really help anyone, so this is the best place for him. It’s everywhere, on all sides and angles. This is where the father needs to be. Not in some church, gathering dust.
A small piece of truth, I do not carry a sickle or a scythe. I only wear a black hooded robe when it’s cold. And I do not have those skull-like facial features that you seem to enjoy pinning on me from a distance. Want to know what I truly look like? I’ll help you out. Find yourself a mirror while I continue.
Before they proceeded to their respective homes, Rudy’s voice reached over and handed Liesel the truth. For a while, it sat on her shoulder, but a few thoughts later, it made its way to her ear.
He invited his people toward his own glorious heart, beckoning them with his finest, ugliest words, handpicked from his forests. And the people came. They were all placed on a conveyor belt and run through a rampant machine that gave them a lifetime in ten minutes. Words were fed into them. Time disappeared and they now Knew everything they needed to know. They were hypnotized.