“I most definitely can be cheerful. I can be amiable. Agreeable. Affable. And that is only the A’s.
Just don’t ask me to be nice. Nice has nothing to do with me.”

During the first paragraph of the book the first character that Markus Zusak has introduced the reader has contradicted themselves.
This character is the personification of death, death is talking about how it is hard to be “…cheerful about this whole topic…”. But then goes on to state that outside these events, he is able to be “cheerful, amiable, Agreeable, Affable and that those are only the A’s”, but they want you to not associate them with “nice”. This is the contradiction, the definition/aspects of being “nice” is to amiable, Agreeable…, so for a character to understand that they have the aspects of the characteristic but to not want to be associated to the characteristic, is contradictory.
Another way of looking at it is that the character knows that they have the aspects of being nice but feel that if they are associated with being nice that they will have to fulfill the expectations of being nice, my personal expectations of someone who is nice is that they are agreeable, friendly and someone that won’t hurt you(whether that be emotionally or physically). The last expectation of mine for someone who is nice is why i believe that death doesn’t want to associate with nice, because it knows that it is impossible for it to keep that promise, because death is already associated with one of the hardest and probably most damaging experience that someone can have… DEATH.