Markus Zusak Quotes

These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses. It is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend. Perhaps I am learning to live amongst the living again. Practising, I mean. But no, that is not it. Being here is just a way of not being anywhere.

I never changed after that. I sought for nothing in the one great source of change which is humanity. And even in my love and absorption with the beauty of the world, I sought to learn nothing that could be given back to humanity. I drank of the beauty of the world as a vampire drinks. I was satisfied. I was filled to the brim. But I was dead. And I was changeless.

A man who lives unrelated to other human beings dies. But a man who lives unrelated to himself also dies.

But inside or out, I was alone, and I was beginning to wonder if I always had been, if I always would be.

A being who, as I grew older, lost imagination, emotion, a type of intelligence, a way of feeling things - all that which, while it made me sorry, did not horrify me. But what am I experiencing when I read myself as if I were someone else? On which bank am I standing if I see myself in the depths?

A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation.

--then on the shore Of the wide world I stand alone, and think Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

The man whose whole activity is diverted to inner meditation becomes insensible to all his surroundings. His passions are mere appearances, being sterile. They are dissipated in futile imaginings, producing nothing external to themselves.

I could disappear from the face of the earth, and the world would go on moving without the slightest twinge. Things were tremendously complicated, to be sure, but one thing was clear: no one needed me.

I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.

Why am I always looking at life through a window?

He liked the loneliness of inner space, the sense of being forgotten by the world.

You can sit up here, feeling above it all while knowing you’re not, coming to the lonely conclusion that the only thing you can ever really know about anyone is that you don’t know anything about them at all.

A wholesome oblivion of one's neighbours is the beginning of wisdom.

Do your work for six years; but in the seventh, go into solitude or among strangers, so that the memory of your friends does not hinder you from being what you have become.

I don't think you ever know in yourself whether you have gone mad. You exist in a bubble. There comes a point where you suddenly feel not really a part of the world, you're just passing through.

I'm somewhat in my own cloud.

Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

When I wasn't working I didn't know what to do with myself and sort of didn't exist, in a way, when I wasn't working, so I was like two different people. I am not like that anymore.

I even found it difficult to watch myself playing on TV because I couldn't identify with the person on the screen. I couldn't get to grips with it. It was as if it was all happening to someone else.

I'm kind of in my own world.

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in any direction. I have not even any defense to offer for standing on this platform, holding on to this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, nor for the people who give way to the tram or walk quietly along or stand gazing into shop windows. Nobody asks me to put up a defense, indeed, but that is irrelevant.

I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist. I’m the space between what I’d like to be and what others made of me. Just let me be at ease and all by myself in my room.

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough

Once you're alienated, you're on your own. That takes you to the world of the existential, where things just kind of float.