Quotes from Scott Westerfeld

Doing what you're supposed to do is always boring. I can't imagine anything worse than being required to have fun.

When Tally glanced out at the glowing horizon, her eyes opened wide. She'd never seen dawn from outside the city before. Like most uglies, she was rarely up early enough, and in any case the horizon was always hidden behind the skyline of New Pretty Town. The sight of a real sunrise amazed her. A

But I wanted to finish your book.

She wondered how much of being ugly was just an awkward age.

Don't worry, Aya-la," Tally said, firmly grasping her wrist. "You'll still be real, even with no hovercam watching.

Stay icy, Tally-wa

If you see everything through hovercams and feed stories, you wind up blind to what's right in front of you.

It was way cool, being the one who did the math.

There are probably a dozen perfect happy endings you could write. And a thousand bittersweet ones, and at least a million that are gloriously tragic. Alas, you only get to pick one.

the city interface didn't care why people were talking about you—because you were talented or merely beautiful, ingenious or just crazy, concerned about the planet or outraged over nothing at all

That's how things were out here in the wild, she was learning. Dangerous or beautiful. Or both.

Shay scowled. "What, can't you stand me? Do you need to get some picture into your head so you can imagine it instead of my face?" "Shay! Come on. It's just for fun." "Making ourselves feel ugly is not fun." "We are ugly!" "This whole game is just designed to make us hate ourselves.

If is a word that can never be said too loudly

mass production. Instead of making things only when people needed them, like holes in the wall did, Rusty factories had churned out vast quantities of stuff—the whole world in a giant competition to use up resources as quickly as possible.

surprise. "Come on

Maybe they're not as mindless as we thought, or so dedicated to turning every last human into one of them. Like Kalyn says, they were just bored, waiting for something better to happen. And that better thing is us.

Maybe this time she could show him what was really inside her, deeper than any operation could reach.

They talk with their hands, a gesture for every syllable, conductors guiding their conversation like an orchestra.

The world always had more details than you could remember, more than you could even see, and a thousand times more than you could ever write down. You were always deleting and forgetting far more than you could express in words.

No self-respecting free city would allow politicians to weigh in on refugee issues.

It doesn't take much convincing to make someone believe they're better than everyone else.

You weren't born expecting that kind of beauty in everyone, all the time. You just got programmed into thinking anything else is ugly.

Nature was tough, it could be dangerous, but unlike Dr. Cable or Shay or Peris—unlike people in general—it made sense.

She was Tally Youngblood... The girl with a pretty body and a Ugly mind.