Markus Zusak Quotes

Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both...Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both.

The consequence of this is that I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both.

The world is awful but also the world is beautiful. Human beings are awful, but ultimately human beings are tremendous.

Beautiful. And ugly. The world is always both.

Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.

Some really good things kind of swing both ways and I like to see people that can swing really, really, really sad and horrible and terrible and really, really, really beautiful and funny.

In Chekhov, everything blends into its opposite, just fractionally, and this is sort of unsettling. And that's why you end up 100 years later asking, 'Is that moment tragic or comic?'

In the midst of the fountain of wit there arises something bitter, which stings in the very flowers.

I'm trying to get at something a little transcendent between humans. But at the same time, there's all that baggage: What's beautiful about humans is what's balanced by what's kind of ugly and petty and depressing.

Everybody knows someone like that: wonderful, attractive people full of passion and ideals. You envy them, but you know there's a dark side, which is brutal and cruel and violent. That dark side informs what's wonderful about them, and the passion and rage inform the darkness; they're inseparable.

I consider myself a natural optimist. I like the dark side of things.

Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.

From the first time he'd met her, he'd sensed an air of contradiction about her. She was very much a woman, but still retained a waiflike quality. She could be brash, and at times deliberately suggestive, yet she was painfully shy. She was incredibly easy to get along with, yet she had few friends. She was a talented artist in her own right, but so self-conscious about her work that she rarely completed a piece and preferred to work with other people's art and ideas.

Surely life has taught you that a thing can be both beautiful and vile.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

I have a love/hate relationship with just about everything, but certainly with America.

I am quite a cheerful, dark person. On the outside, I'm optimistic but I expect the worst to happen.

In the midst of vice we are in virtue, and vice versa.

Nobody's all good or bad, and nobody's all light or dark. Every human being has so many different aspects and facets to them. And there can be something noble and something really dark and dangerous going on in a person all at the same time.

We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.

Being ambivalent doesn't mean that you're a relevatist, that anything goes; it just means that you show the complexity of life. Life is always complex.

The world's as ugly as sin, and almost as delightful.

I think we do good things and bad things, sometimes simultaneously - or they may be the same thing.

I go back and forth between wanting to be abundantly simple and maddeningly complex.

All the things that I find beautiful have a darkness about them.