Markus Zusak Quotes

All the world old is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer.

Humans are capable of so much creativity and goodness and at the same time they are destructive and cruel. (Leta)

Perhaps because I'll never be one, humans are interesting to me.

The human race has improved everything, but the human race.

common sense is a very tricky instrument; it is as deceptive as it is indispensable.

The human race consists of the damned and the ought-to-be damned.

[Cannery Row's] inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing.

No man can see his own prejudices.

Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.

Laurel could not see her face but only the back of her neck, the most vulnerable part of anybody, and she thought: Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?

I just think racism is within each and every one of us. It's everyone's responsibility to figure out how they deal with this kind of obsolete instinct.

men do not suspect faults which they do not commit

To achieve accurate knowledge of others, if such a thing were possible, we could only ever arrive at it through the slow and unsure recognition of our own initial optical inaccuracies. However, such knowledge is not possible: for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them that we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date.

We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?

I love humans; always seeing patterns in things that aren’t there.

Everybody thinks himself so well supplied with common sense that even those most difficult to please. . . never desire more of it than they already have.

A friend should always underestimate your virtues and an enemy overestimate your faults

I wanted to tell the book thief many things, about beauty and brutality. But what could I tell her about those things that she didn't already know? I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race - that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.

Human beings can be awful, but they can also be tremendous.

I suppose the human race is doing the best it can but hells bells thats only an explanation its not an excuse.

We are quick to flare up, we races of men on the earth.

Again, if you only know what you know, you don't know if something's good or bad. You don't have perspective.

What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor,' the prince said, 'is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous

there was no greater natural advantage in life than having an enemy overestimate your faults, unless it was to have a friend underestimate your virtues.

Maybe it was the same with people: if you studied them,you'd see new and different things. But would you like what you saw? Did it depend on who was doing the looking?