When a person's last response was Saumensch or Saukerl or Arschloch, you knew you had them beaten.

A snowball in the face is surely the perfect beginning to a lasting friendship.

… 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.

Imagine smiling after a slap in the face. Then think of doing it twenty-four hours a day.

Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness.

Sometimes people are beautiful. Not in looks. Not in what they say. Just in what they are.

I have to say that although it broke my heart, I was, and still am, glad I was there.

Please, trust me, I most definitely can be cheerful. I can be amiable. Agreeable. Affable. And that's only the A's. Just don't ask me to be nice. Nice has nothing to do with me.

I guess that’s the beauty of books. When they finish they don’t really finish.

Sometimes I just survive. But sometimes I stand on the rooftop of my existence, arms stretched out, begging for more.

If only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter.

She saw clearly a boy and a man fighting for control of the same face.

A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over.

I read that prior to the advent of color TV, most people dreamed in black and white.

The ceremony took six minutes. The marriage lasted about the same amount of time though we didn't get a divorce for almost a year.

The only way to survive is to intently focus on how the art world operates. Once you understand how things work, you can find a solution to the problems you are facing.

Better do nothing than do ill.

What I can't do is have an intelligent conversation with [George Stephanopoulos] about a report in "The New York Times" that is unnamed, inconclusive, and based on something that isn't true.

Hypotyposis is the rhetorical effect by which words succeed in rendering a visual scene.

Nothing happens to you that has not happened to someone else.

Dissembling courtesy! How fine this tyrant can trickle when she wounds!