She was a girl. In Nazi Germany. How fitting that she was discovering the power of words.
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.
The happening that happened was that I met this girl...
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 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.
She closes the door completely, and I crouch there. I allow myself to fall forward and rest my head on the door frame. My breath bleeds. My heartbeat drowns my ears.
Liesel crossed the bridge over the Amper River. The water was glorious and emerald and rich. She could see the stones at the bottom and hear the familiar song of water. The world did not deserve such a river.
Fear is shiny. Ruthless in the eyes.
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.
Liesel observed the strangeness of her foster father’s eyes. They were made of kindness, and silver.
He left Himmel Street wearing his hangover and a suit.
The conversation of bullets.
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.
People die of broken hearts. They have heart attacks. And it’s the heart that hurts most when things go wrong and fall apart.
Summer came. For the books thief, everything was going nicely. For me, the sky was the color of Jews.
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.
Two weeks to change the world, fourteen days to destroy it.
Five hundred souls. I carried them in my fingers, like suitcases. Or I’d throw them over my shoulder. It was only the the children I carried in my arms.
I look at her wish we could go inside and make love on the couch. Dive inside each other. Take each other. Make each other. Nothing happens, though.
An eleven-year-old girl is many things, but she is not stupid.
It’s not the place, I think. It’s the people. We’d have all been the same anywhere else.