an expression of surprise falls from her face, though she's trying to keep it. it breaks off and she seems to catch it and fidget with it in her hands.

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.

In a desperate attempt to stay young forever we have achieved eternal childishness, rather than eternal youth.

At the beginning of that interval a type-machine was a curiosity. The person who owned one was a curiosity, too. But now it is the other way about: the person who doesn't own one is a curiosity.

If you accept the expectations of others, especially negative ones, then you never will change the outcome.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

I wrote a couple of scripts on spec that didn't get made but got some attention, and I then got offers to write professionally.

The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation of it.

When in company, put not your hands to any part of the body, not usually discovered.

The only pitch I have to movie people is the same as this one: Just give me $8 million. I'm not telling you what it's about and I'm not telling you who's in it.

There are always going to be things you don’t like about yourself or reasons to compare yourself to others, but once you realize that you only get one you, it’s best to just love yourself.

Physics should represent a reality in time and space, free from spooky action at a distance.