Markus Zusak Quotes

I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.

I started with things that I was troubled by or confused by or interested in, and then I wrote stories to try to puzzle my way through it. But the question is not how to represent war, because it's an abstract thing that's felt differently for all the characters.

Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle.

I was really dramatic, really concerned with love or life.

I think I was kind of melancholy as a kid. I spent a lot of time inside my own head, a lot of time sort of staring into space wondering the hell was going on.

Everyone just wants to feel good, and I don't think that all music is designed to make you feel good.

I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it’ll make sense.

Man... knows only when he is satisfied and when he suffers, and only his sufferings and his satisfactions instruct him concerning himself, teach him what to seek and what to avoid. For the rest, man is a confused creature; he knows not whence he comes or whither he goes, he knows little of the world, and above all, he knows little of himself.

It hurts to want everything and nothing at the same time.

That's the thing about pain, it demands to be felt.

All anger feels like righteous anger; sorrow does not care whether it is righteous or not.

Was it someone else? Was it not you yourself?

Radomosity, thought Artemis. And he felt like weeping.

Isn't it weird that I'm getting all emotionable?

When I walked down the streets, I asked myself, are these my people?, is this my hometown, am I who I am?

I want - I want - I want - was all that she could think about - but just what this real want was she did not know.

She knew what it felt like to tremble like that before touching someone -- desire so acute that it became despair.

All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want. Let's leave it like that.

I was like, 'Huh? You want my jersey?'

Olympia thinks often about desire - desire that stops the breath, that causes a preoccupied pause in the midst of uttering a sentence - and how it may upend a life and threaten to dissolve the soul.

What was life asking of me? How could I respond when I didn't know the question?

It was long since I had longed for anything and the effect on me was horrible.

There have been times when you doubt yourself. You don't know if you're working on the right things.

I'd forgotten how that sort of craving felt, how it rose suddenly and loudly from the pit of my stomach like a flock of startle birds, then floated back down in the slow, beguiling way of feathers.

We want to make people feel something after they buy that ticket.