Quotes from Scott Westerfeld

Fine. Seer knows best, even if he is nuts. Maybe I can stand to wait a few more... whoa. What the hell happened to my car? -Melissa

We needed to become world-famous soon, while there was still that kind of world to be famous in...

She wasn't here to gawk. She was an infiltrator, a sneak, an ugly. And she had a mission.

I'm Tally Youngblood. Make me pretty. -Tally Youngblood

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

The world rests upon a turtle, which itself stands on the back of an elephant!" Alek tried not to laugh. "Then what does the elephant stand on, madam?" "Don't try to be clever, young man." She narrowed her eyes. "It's elephants all the way down!

Hiding from the truth was worse than being lied to.

Or maybe when they do the operation- when they grind and stretch your bones to the right shape, peel off your face and rub all your skin away, and stick in plastic cheekbones so you look like everybody else- maybe after going through all that you just aren't very interesting anymore. -Shay, Uglies

Fate didn't care a squick about what anybody was meant to do.

You look beautiful - David

No matter how far from the war we run, it always catches up with us.

Dude, I just watched you climb up a f*cking building!-Lace

The physical beauty…also cleared her mind of worries. Every day seemed to change the mountain, the sky, and the surrounding valleys, making them spectacular in a completely new way. Nature, at least, didn't need an operation to be beautiful. It just was.

Maybe human beings are programmed...to help one another, even to fall in love. But just because it's human nature doesn't make it bad...

I like my first lines short and declarative. No complicated sentences. Of course, that's not really a Scott thing. It's pretty classic grab-the-reader technique.

The beauty of the world…has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. —Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (part 3, Pretties)

The best way to know a city is to eat it.

Around the outskirts of the city, cut off from town by the black oval of the river, everything was in darkness. Everyone ugly was in bed by now.

You don't know what it's like, when your best friend disappears.

The Rusty Ruins were the remains of an old city, a hulking reminder of back when there'd been way too many people, and everyone was incredibly stupid. And ugly.

Once you told yourself a story enough times, it was so easy to keep on believing it.

You fiddle lucker!' she cried.

Maybe she still was a pretty-head, making up irrational stories about the empty forest. The longer she stayed alone out here, the more Tally understood why the Rusties and their predecessors had believed in invisible beings, praying to placate spirits as they trashed the natural world around them.

She couldn't disappoint the whole village. There were no wallscreens here, no newsfeeds or satellites bands, and touring soccer teams were no doubt few and far between. (...), that made stories a valuable commodity, and it probably wasn't very often that a stranger dropped in from the sky.