Markus Zusak Bridge Of Clay Quotes

There are hundreds of thoughts per every word spoken, and that's if they're spoken at all.

There were reasons to leave, and reasons to stay, and all of it was the same.

We skip the moments like stones.

A murderer should probably do many things, but he should never, under any circumstances, come home.

It was a Sunday, an arsonist sunrise.

She laughed and he felt her breath, and he thought about that warmness, how people were warm like that, from inside to out; how it could hit you and disappear, then back again, and nothing was ever permanent--

I loved you already then.

He, as much as anyone, knows who and why and what we are: A family of ramshackle tragedy. A comic book kapow of boys and blood and beasts.

Me, I'm known for bruises and levelheadedness, for height and muscle and blasphemy, and the occasional sentimentality.

All that remained was to get to camp, learn English better, find a job and a place to live. Then, most importantly, buy a bookshelf. And a piano.

There was rain like a ghost you could walk through. Almost dry when it hit the ground.

He was a wasteland in a suit; he was bent-postured, he was broken.

He was a great horse,” she went on, “and the perfect story—we wouldn’t love him so much if he’d lived.

When you wait you start feeling deserved.

As if sensing the oncoming theatre, the pigeons arrived from nowhere, and dug in close on the powerlines. They were perched on TV aerials, and, God forbid, on the trees. There was also a single crow, fat-feathered and plump, like a pigeon disguised in a trench coat.

...somewhere in his murkiest depths, he wasn't so much afraid of being left again as condemning someone else to second best.

He was caught somewhere, in the current--of destroying everything he had, to become all he needed to be

Writing is always difficult, but easier with something to say.

Each boy stood, slouched yet stiff, hands in pockets. If the dog had pockets, she'd have had her paws in them, too, for sure.

They were virtuosos of alliteration and didn’t know it.

Returning and being let in: Two very different things.

There was guilt for enjoying anything. Especially the joy of forgetting.

There was a kind of generosity to her, of heat and sweat and life.

He loved her more than Michelangelo.

A family of ramshackle tragedy. A comic book kapow of boys and blood and beasts. We were born for relics like these.

We admit to almost everything, and the almost is all that counts.

Those kids, they would've loved this place, they would've walked and skipped and danced here, all legs and sunny hair. They'd have cartwheeled the lawn, shouting, "And don't go lookin' at our knickers, right?

He’d told them what Saturday night meant. The mattress, the plastic sheet. He told them of Matador in the fifth. He said he loved her from the very first time she’d talked to him, and it was his fault, it was all his fault. Clay melted, but didn’t break, because he deserved no tears or sympathy. ‘The night before she fell,’ he said, ‘we met there, we were naked there, and –’ He stopped because Catherine Novac – in a shift of gingerblondness – had stood and she’d walked towards him. She lifted him gently out of his chair and hugged him hard, so hard, and she patted his short flat hair, and it was so damn nice it hurt. She said, ‘You came to us, you came, you came.

But now those thoughts weren't thoughts at all, they were clouds of landed punches, and every one fell true.

He was built like a very small supermarket: Compact; expensive if you crossed him.

She tried to reassemble herself, to resemble herself...

Carey liked the fact that Michelangelo had had his nose broken as a teenager, for being too much of a smart mouth; a reminder that he was human. A badge of imperfection.

She couldn’t ever see how broken he was, while the rest of us stood and watched them. She was in jeans, bare feet and T-shirt, and maybe that’s what finished us off. She looked just like a Dunbar boy. With that haircut she was one of us.

She didn’t overreact. It may have crossed her mind to march down to the woman responsible for sending this charity shitbox, but she didn’t. She swallowed the glint of anger. She packed it into her prim-and-proper voice, and like her son, moved on.

She was lost in pine and mountainside, her knuckles bony white.

Keeping your nose clean while an entire system broke down around you guaranteed only that you would survive longer, not that you would survive.

You could see how hard he loved her. His heart was so obliterated, but he found the will to work it. He was tired, so tired, in the porch light. Just bits-and-pieces of a man.

He would suffer before he’d belong, unable to show himself easily; a preference for greater hope—to find someone who would know him completely.

Achilles.

the moronic nature of fighting it--of killing yourself to survive.

and I held him, like love, in my arms.

When it was over, they lay on their backs; there was a window on this, the top floor of the stairwell, and grubby light, and rising-falling chests. The air was heavy. Tons of it, heaping from their lungs. Henry gulped it good and hard, but his mouth showed true heart.

Clay - who was the quiet one, or the smiler - only turned, one last time, and stared across the sunlit district of statues, crosses, and gravestones. They looked like runners-up trophies. Every last one.

The town itself was a hard, distant storyland; you could see it from afar. There was all the straw-like landscape, and marathons of sky. Around it, a wilderness of low scrub and gum trees stood close by, and it was true, it was so damn true: the people sloped and slouched.

Around six-thirty, Rory was across the street, leaning against a telegraph pole, smiling just for laughs; the world was filthy, and so was he. After a short search, he pulled a long strand of girls' hair from his mouth. Whoever she was, she was out there somewhere, she lay open-legged in Rory's head. A girl we'll never know, or see.

There were great big shrugs of breath of him...

There was the odd suburban thunderbolt, but they were mostly those people who'd found each other; they were golden and bright-lit and funny. Often they seemed in cahoots somehow, like jailbirds who wouldn't leave; they loved us, they liked us, and that was a pretty good trick.

The dilemma, of course, was the communism. A single great idea. A thousand limits and flaws. Growing up, Penelope never noticed. What child ever does? There was nothing to compare it to.

Sure, she loved horses, she enjoyed racing, but she abhorred the racing business; its wastage, its overbreeding. Its greedy girth of underbelly. It was something like a beautiful whore, and she’d seen it devoid of make-up.

Trust the murderer to be unkillable at the one moment he was better off dead.

We lay like prisoners of war.

After a while she said she was hot,

you could set your watch to those hoofbeats, too, and your life to the hand of Tommy—as he led the mule fondly home, to the months and the girl to come.

The proof was all in the hands.

So much of the dying hurt us.

She was right, you know, Abbey Hanley—she said beautiful—can’t you see it?” Up close she was light but visceral, she could keep you alive with her pleading; the pain in her good-green eyes. “Can’t you see I’ll never leave you, Clay? Can’t you see I’ll never leave?” Clay looked like he might fall then. Carey wrapped him tightly. She just held him and hugged him and whispered to him, and he felt all her bones within her. She smiled and cried and smiled. She said, “Go to The Surrounds. Go on Saturday night.” She kissed him on the neck there, and pressed the words all down. “I’ll never leave you, ever—” and that’s how I like to remember them: