Quotes from Scott Westerfeld

Maybe that was why she was helping Madeleine. She was a manipulative bitch, but Dess couldn't imagine living in any other reality than the one those manipulations had created. In a way, Dess owed the old mindcaster something. Like her life, such as it was.

The war will end one day. Wars always do.

Tally snorted. "I don't think it's exactly boring, Shay." "Doing what you're supposed to do is always boring. I can't imagine anything worse than being required to have fun." "I can," Tally said quietly. "Never having any.

I swallowed my screams whole. They went down my throat as sharp-cornered and cold as ice cubes.

Let's kill a rabbit," Col says when he wakes up.

My name's Tally Youngblood," she said. "Sorry to disturb you, but this is a special circumstance.

Run and hide. We're on our way.

It helps to be with people who remember you, and who still think about you.

Ninety-nine percent of humanity had had something done to their brains, and only a few people in the world knew exactly what. •

she'd felt from David was crushed by it. Every day of her life she'd insulted other uglies and had been insulted in return. Fattie, Pig-Eyes, Boney, Zits, Freak—all the names uglies called one another, eagerly and without reserve. But equally, without exception, so that no one felt shut out by some irrelevant mischance of birth.

A liberdade costuma destruir as coisas, sabe.

It didn't matter what you looked like. It was how you carried yourself, how you saw yourself.

And Deryn didn't mind the constant practice in useful skills like knife throwing, swearing, and not showing pain when punched. But how did boys keep this up their whole barking lives?

Eating breakfast by the river, Tally took time to appreciate her SwedeBalls.

Maybe he really could see past her ugly face. Maybe what was inside her did matter to him more than anything else. Tally

When the people of the world all know beauty as beauty, There arises the recognition of ugliness. When they all know the good as good, There arises the recognition of evil.

The moment her feet touched the floor, a chill ran up her spine. She was standing on her sweatshirt, which lay next to her bed in a crumpled pile. It was soaking wet.

Beauty is that Medusa's head Which men go armed to seek and sever. It is most deadly when most dead. And dead will stare and sting forever. —Archibald MacLeish, "Beauty

The guy walking past was wearing a shit five sizes too big (innovated by gangbangers to hide guns in their waistbands), shorts down below his knees (innovated by surfers to keep their thighs from getting sunburned), and oversized shoes (innovated by skaters to save their feet from injury).

We're all made stories.

She scanned the captives, looking for Shay and David. The familiar faces in the crowd were haggard, dirty, crumpled by shock and defeat, but Tally realized that she no longer thought of them as ugly. It was the cold expressions of the Specials, beautiful though they were, that seemed horrific to her now. A

Yeah, I can read, he said. Didn't mean to shock you. Maybe you thought I ran around in a little wheel all day?

The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit. Of

Battered by the mind noise, huddled in the back with eyes closed and fists clenched, the old Melissa had understood pep rallies about as well as a bird sucked through a jet engine comprehended aircraft design.