Quotes from Neal Shusterman

Some things simply made a person feel feminine; other things made a person feel masculine. Wasn't that true of everyone regardless of gender? Or did binaries deny themselves the things that didn't fit the mold? Well, regardless, Jerico found the faux pas and overcompensations more humorous than anything else.

Connor tries to hold her arm to give her support, but she shakes him off and throws him a nasty gaze. If I want your help, I'll ask. Do I look feeble to you? Actually, yes. Looks are deceiving. she says. After all, when I saw you, I thought you looked reasonably intelligent. Very funny.

And so, as the mob backs away to give them space... as the riot police holster their weapons, standing down, and as Risa takes the podium, calming the crowd with a voice as soothing as a sonata, Connor Lassiter holds his family like he'll never let them go.

But sometimes you get a career and then you suddenly realize you don't have a life. Or if you stay at home with your family, you suddenly realize that your life is actually everyone else's life, not your own. Either way, when you got all your eggs in one basket, the basket gets heavy. Maybe the eggs start to break.

Please," he begs, his tears overwhelming his emotional nanites' attempt to ease his distress. "Please give me a sign. That's all I ask. Just a sign that you haven't abandoned me." And then I realize that, although there is a law against my direct communication with an unsavory, I do not have a law against signs and wonders.

Even now, she looked radiant to him. How ridiculous that he'd be romanticizing her in these final hours. What could have once been love was now the resignation of a heart long broken.

Innocence is doomed to die a senseless death at our own hands, a casualty of the mistakes we can never undo.

Part of my job is to help other kids find books, because not everyone has a keenly organized mind. Some kids could wander the library for hours and still have no idea how to find anything. For them, the Dewey Decimal System might as well be advanced calculus.

He only wishes there were something that would heal the scars in his mind, which he can still feel. He sees his mind now as an archipelago of islands that he labors to build bridges between - and while he's had great success engineering the most spectacular of bridges, he suspects there are some islands that he'll never reach.

People are vessels," Jeri had said to her. "They hold whatever's poured into them.

There are no wrong thoughts, only thoughts that need to be worked through and overcome.

In fact, in the grand scheme of things, everyone was equally useless.

Keep me warm. I have no warmth of my own- only what the sun brings me, and the sun is halfway around the world. Keep me warm.

Leadership is about keeping toilets flushing, the Admiral once said. Unless you're on the battlefront. Then it's about staying alive. Neither are pleasant.

I am legend. Yet every day I wish that I was not.

I'm evolving, is the thing; I'm a god becoming a constellation.' 'The constellations are mostly demigods,' I point out. 'And they didn't get to be constellations until after they died.' He laughs at that, and says, 'Death is a small sacrifice to become immortal.

Nature deemed that to be born was an automatic sentence to death, and then brought about that death with vicious consistency. We

I have no idea,' he tells her, and there is such a spark in his eye when he says it, she can tell having no idea is exactly the way he wants it.

The nation was tearing itself apart over pro-life and pro-choice but completely ignored the problems of the kids who were already here. I mean, no schools, no work, no clue if they'd even have a future. They just went nuts!

still I cast my voice out into the void, hoping to reach something beyond distance

In the backseat Moose and Squirrel inhabited a pair of six-year-old-twins, and wouldn't stop bickering and picking their noses. They were clearly in their element.

What do you do with a textbook case when no one's written the textbook?

As a kid you idolize your parents. You think they're perfect, because they're the yardstick by which you measure the rest of the world, and yourself. Then as a teenager they just piss you off, because you realize that not only are they not perfect, but they may be even a little more screwed up than you. But there's that moment when you realize they're not superheroes, or villains. They're painfully, unforgivably human. The question is, can you forgive them for being human anyway?

And as I see it they are all innocent. Even the guilty. Everyone is guilty of something, and everyone still harbors a memory of childhood innocence, no matter how many layers of life wrap around it, Humanity is innocent; humanity is guilty, and both states are undeniably true.