Real love

Real love, she says, is when you get as much pleasure from giving pleasure as you do from receiving it.

Paul Auster
Invisible

Poetry Vs Justice

From poetry to justice, then. Poetic justice, if you will. For the sad fact remains: there is far more poetry in the world than justice.

Paul Auster
Invisible

Power is the only constant

Bombastic pronouncements, wild generalizations, bitter declarations about the corruption of all governments - past, present and future; left, right and center - and how our so-called civilization was no more than a thin screen masking a never-ending assault of barbarism and cruelty. Human beings were animals, he said, and soft-minded aesthetes like myself were no better than children, diverting ourselves with hairsplitting philosophies of art and literature to avoid confronting the essential truth of the world. Power was the only constant, and the law of life was kill or be killed, either dominate or fall victim to the savagery of monsters.

Paul Auster
Invisible

Vanity

I was also fascinated by this peculiar, unreadable person, and the fact that he seemed genuinely glad to have stumbled into me stoked the fires of my vanity - than invisible cauldron of self-regard and ambition that simmers and burns in each one of us.

Paul Auster
Invisible

War

Never underestimate the importance of war. War is the purest, most vivid expression of the human soul.

Paul Auster
Invisible

Good sense

A human doesn't have a heart like mine. The human heart is a line, whereas my own is a circle, and I have the endless ability to be in the right place at the right time. The consequence of this is that I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugliness and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both. Still, they have one thing that I envy. Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die. 

Markus Zusak

The Book Thief

The act of dying

For some reason, dying men always ask questions they know the answer to. Perhaps it's so they can die being right.

Markus Zusak
The Book Thief

Self-Obsession

A Small Piece of Truth (Death - The narrator)

I do not carry a sickle or scythe.

I only wear a hooded black robe when it's cold.

And I don't have those skull-like

facial feature you seem to enjoy 

pinning on me from a distance. You

want to know what I truly look like?

I'll help you out. Find yourself

a mirror while I continue.

I actually feel quite self-indulgent at the moment, telling you all about me, me, me... On the other hand, you 're human - you should understand self-obession.

Markus Zusak 
The Book Thief

A Young Man

'After all you should know it yourself - a young man is still a boy, and a boy sometimes has the right to be stubborn'

Markus Zusak
The Book Thief

Capacity of escalating

Although something inside told her that this was a crime - after all, her three books were the most precious items she owned - she was compelled to see the thing lit. She couldn't help it. I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sandcastles, houses of cards, that's were they begin. Their great skill is the capacity to escalate.

Markus Zusak
The Book Thief