Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die.

Taken at face value, the line is a darkly ironic compliment: whatever else humans may do foolishly or cruelly, they at least possess the “good sense” to be mortal. The phrasing treats death as a kind of corrective or limit—an endpoint that prevents human error, violence, or hubris from continuing indefinitely. It also hints at a narrator’s sardonic distance from humanity, as if observing people with weary familiarity. In Zusak’s fiction, such a sentiment would resonate with themes of suffering, impermanence, and the uneasy coexistence of beauty and brutality, where mortality is both tragedy and release.