Quotes from Neal Shusterman

Permission is the bloated corpse of freedom.

They are not people--they are ideas. They are just extensions of the enemy.

The question wasn't whether or not I cared about him; the question was, how much? I'm glad Tennyson didn't ask that, because then I'd have to ask myself; and I already knew the answer. I cared far more than was safe.

Mary believes she was put on earth to bring an end to the living world." Both Nick and Mikey just stared at her. "What do you mean … end?" asked Mikey. "End means end. Complete and total destruction. She wants to kill everyone and everything. She wants to bring down every building, burn every forest, empty every ocean of life. She wants to turn the earth into a dead planet …

Griping is for those without a plan of action...

Here, it seemed muscle wasn't made of flesh and blood, it was made of will and anger.

The fact that it was not human meant that it could never understand certain things, in spite of its immense empathy and intellect. It couldn't comprehend, for instance, that the terror of the unknown was just as awful, and just as real, regardless of whether or not there was truly something to fear.

As far as authority is concerned, calm people quietly dying is a lot easier to deal with than angry people fighting for their lives.

Close enough to feel it, but not close enough to burn.

What must life have been like in the Age of Mortality? Full of passions, both good and bad. Fear giving rise to faith. Despair giving meaning to elation. They say even the winters were colder and the summers were warmer in those days.

The sad truth about humanity, Risa was quick to realize, is that people believe what they are told. Maybe not the first time, but by the hundredth time, the craziest of ideas just becomes a given.

Death, as they say, doesn't just make all the world kin, it makes all religions one.

From the end of the bar, the bartender threw a sidelong look at him, so Clarence pulled out a broken Bluetooth headset and fixed it to his ear. I learned this trick while traveling with Mikey, Clarence told Nick. Makes my brand of crazy the same as everyone else's.

To be completely helpless in the face of life?powerless to do a single thing?that's what I'd always feared more than anything. It was like I'd been keeping all the edges of my life neat and clean, pretending the neatness was all that mattered, pretending life could somehow be controlled.

I won't tell you what to look for, because if I do, you'll miss the things you would intuitively find.

If you come anywhere near my daughter, I will see to it that you are taken apart piece by bloody piece. Do I make myself clear? Any clearer, says Cam, and you'd be invisible.

From now on, I want my life to be about living.

But birthdays are random... Defining one's life by the day one was cut from an umbilical cord is completely arbitrary.

I always take credit for my acts of cruelty. To do otherwise is cowardice.

When he took her in his arms, it suddenly didn't seem to matter what was going on outside of their tiny, sealed universe. In these terminal minutes of their current lives, it was just the two of them finally, finally giving in to their ultimate act of completion. The binary at last becoming the one.

The sanctity of the law . . . and the wisdom to know when it must be broken.

Crawley reached into the pocket of his fancy robe - a dinner jacket, I think it's called. The kind of thing Professer Plum would wear before killing Colonel Mustard in the ballroom with the candlestick.

Perhaps that is the greatest crime of conquest--that a civilization is denied the right to evolve beyond its own embarrassment.

a true leader never puts his ego ahead of his assets.