"The only thing worse than a boy who hates you: a boy that loves you."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"He was the crazy one who had painted himself black and defeated the world.

She was the book thief without the words.

Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like rain."
— Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)

"If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next -- if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions -- you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning.
You'd never dare to."
— Margaret Atwood (Der blinde Mörder / The Blind Assassin)

"Don't let the bastards grind you down."
— Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)

"Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise."
— Margaret Atwood

"In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt."
— Margaret Atwood

"Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future. The ruin you've made."
— Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)

"The true story is vicious and multiple and untrue after all. Why do you need it? Don’t ever ask for the true story."
— Margaret Atwood

"The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it."
— Margaret Atwood (The Blind Assassin)

"And she finds it difficult to believe -- that a person would love her even when she isn't trying. Trying to figure out what other people need, trying to be worthy."
— Margaret Atwood

"Cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him. Up close, he'll take kindness any day of the week, if there's nothing more alluring to be had."
— Margaret Atwood (The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus)

"Siren Song

This is the one song everyone
would like to learn: the song
that is irresistible:

the song that forces men
to leap overboard in squadrons
even though they see beached skulls

the song nobody knows
because anyone who had heard it
is dead, and the others can’t remember.
Shall I tell you the secret
and if I do, will you get me
out of this bird suit?
I don’t enjoy it here
squatting on this island
looking picturesque and mythical
with these two feathery maniacs,
I don’t enjoy singing
this trio, fatal and valuable.

I will tell the secret to you,
to you, only to you.
Come closer. This song

is a cry for help: Help me!
Only you, only you can,
you are unique

at last. Alas
it is a boring song
but it works every time."
— Margaret Atwood

"It wasn't so easy though, ending the war. A war is a huge fire; the ashes from it drift far, and settle slowly."
— Margaret Atwood (The Blind Assassin)

"Was that the beginning, that evening? It's hard to know. Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring."
— Margaret Atwood (Der blinde Mörder / The Blind Assassin)

"Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.

There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this."
— Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)

"I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you're depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone - and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?"
— Margaret Atwood

"Because artistic I need to be cared for, like a potted plant. A little pruning, a little watering, a little weeding and straightening up, to bring out the best in me."
— Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)

"Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past - the past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace."
— Margaret Atwood (Der blinde Mörder / The Blind Assassin)

"What I remembered then was Reenie, from when we were little. It was Reenie who'd done the bandaging, of scrapes and cuts and minor injuries: Mother might be resting, or doing good deeds elsewhere, but Reenie was always there. She'd scoop us up and sit us on the white enamel kitchen table, alongside the pie dough she was rolling out or the white chicken she was cutting up or the fish she was gutting, and give us a lump of brown sugar to get us to close our mouths. "Tell me where it hurts," she'd say. "Stop howling. Just calm down and show me where."
But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling."
— Margaret Atwood (Der blinde Mörder / The Blind Assassin)

"I could end this with a moral,
as if this were a fable about animals,
though no fables are really about animals."
— Margaret Atwood (The Tent)

"Every habit he's ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom."
— Margaret Atwood

"Most mothers worry when their daughters reach adolescence but I was the opposite. I relaxed, I sighed with relief. Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized."
— Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)

"So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with. That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what."
— Margaret Atwood

"Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened."
— Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)

"Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we're still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants."
— Margaret Atwood (Der blinde Mörder / The Blind Assassin)

"I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it."
— Margaret Atwood (Lady Oracle)

"Forgiving men is so much easier than forgiving women."
— Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)

"Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for trade, we thrive on bones; without them there'd be no stories."
— Margaret Atwood (Der blinde Mörder / The Blind Assassin)

"Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. They hurt themselves instead; or else they do it so the guy doesn't even know he's been hurt until much later. Then he finds out. Then his dick falls off."
— Margaret Atwood (Der blinde Mörder / The Blind Assassin)

"All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.
All of them?
Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist."
— Margaret Atwood

"I look at him with the nostalgic affection men are said to feel for their wars, their fellow veterans. I think, I once threw things at this man. I threw a glass ashtray, a fairly cheap one which didn't break. I threw a shoe (his) and a handbag (mine), not even snapping the handbag shut first, so that he was showered with a metal rain of keys and small change. The worst thing I threw was a small portable television set, standing on the bed and heaving it at him with the aid of the bouncy springs, although the instant I let fly I thought, Oh God, let him duck! I once thought I was capable of murdering him. Today I feel only a mild regret that we were not more civilized with each other at the time. Still, it was amazing, all those explosions, that recklessness, that Technicolor wreckage. Amazing and agonizing and almost lethal."
— Margaret Atwood (Cat's Eye)

"How could I be sleeping with this particular man.... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste."
— Margaret Atwood (Lady Oracle)

"Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth."
— Margaret Atwood (Der blinde Mörder / The Blind Assassin)

"They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions... but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"Atticus said to Jem one day, "I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the backyard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird." That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. "Your father’s right," she said. "Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for. "
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself...It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent."
— Harper Lee

"See there?" Jem was scowling triumphantly. "Nothin' to it. I swear, Scout, sometimes you act so much like a girl its mortifyin"
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"Don’t talk like that, Dill,” said Aunt Alexandra. “It’s not becoming to a child. It’s – cynical.”

“I ain’t cynical, Miss Alexandra. Tellin’ the truth’s not cynical, is it?”

“The way you tell it, it is."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"Scout, I´m telling you for the last time, shut your trap or go home - I declare to the Lord you´re gettin´ more like a girl every day!”
With that, I had no option but to join them."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"If there's just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other? If they're all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other? Scout, I think I'm beginning to understand something. I think I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house all this time. It's because he wants to stay inside."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"No, everybody's gotta learn, nobody's born knowin'. That Walter's as smart as he can be, he just gets held back sometimes because he has to stay out and help his daddy. Nothin's wrong with him. Naw, Jem, I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"We owe it to each other to tell stories."
— Neil Gaiman

"A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest."
— C.S. Lewis

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."
— Maya Angelou