Quotes from Neal Shusterman

I vow to become the change that might have been.

She said her life was completed," Trina said. "That's something that none of us will ever experience. Even if we're gleaned someday, it won't be the same, because we weren't born mortal. From this moment on, no one will ever know what it feels like to be complete.

You see through the facade of the world, Citra Terranova. You'd make a good scythe. Citra recoiled. I'd never want to be one. That, he said, is the first requirement.

Carl was just saying good-bye, Mom said. Really, I said. He must speak in tongues.

Apparently Quinn had woken up a short time ago and immediately asked for ice cream, knowing that kids in hospitals got whatever they wanted.

Who he was and who he will be are connected only by the fine, nearly invisible thread of who he is now.

It's like when you call the radio station when they ask for the ninth caller, but you're never the ninth caller, so when they actually pick up and talk to you, you figure it must be some mistake. Then they put you on the radio, you sound like a complete fool, and then you hang up before you can give them your address, so they can't mail you your concert tickets. Don't laugh - it happened.

Maybe it's the best answer of all. If more people could admit they really don't know, maybe there never would have been a Heartland War.

Would the Thunderhead grieve our passing, I wonder? And if so, would it grieve as the child who has lost a parent, or as the parent who could not save a petulant child from its own poor choices?

First rule of motherhood, dearie: men are screw-ups. Learn it now and you'll be a whole lot happier.

The Thunderhead had no arms to embrace. Even so, it could feel the beat of Greyson's heart and the precise temperature of his body as if it were right beside him. To lose that would be a cause of immeasurable sorrow. And so night after night, the Thunderhead silently monitored Greyson in every way it could. Because monitoring was the closest it could come to embracing.

Wish me luck, dear.' 'I won't do that.' And when Marie looked to Anastasia for an explanation, the girl smiled and said, 'Luck is for losers. You have history on your side. You have gravity, You have authority. You are the Granddame of Death.' And then she added, 'Your Excellency.

But life doesn't end," the smiling proponents of unwinding all insist. "It just transforms. We like to call it 'living in a divided state.'

I wish you could have felt that slap I wish you could feel the pain.

He does not see . . . because his eyes are shut too tightly to know anything beyond his own anguish.

At last, he allows himself the wonderful luxury of hope.

It sets me off giggling, which gets everyone else laughing. And it occurs to me that even in these do-or-die moments, there's still space for us to laugh. I guess that means we still have some fight left in us.

Elasticity is a fundamental principle of perception

We tried to be good parents . . . but there's a point at which you give up trying." "No, there's not," Connor tells her. Then he turns to go, leaving them with the worst punishment of all: having to live with themselves.

Perhaps, thought Talon, there was a path in between. A way to shed their ignorance without losing their souls.

You can't expose a lie without first shattering the will to believe it. That is why leading people to truth is so much more effective than merely telling them.

Life is like a bad haircut. At first it looks awful, then you kind of get used to it, and before you know it, it grows out and you gotta get another haircut that maybe won't be so bad... So life goes on, good haircut, bad haircut, until finally you go bald, and it don't matter no more.

That which we name takes greater weight than the sea it displaces. Ask any shipwreck.

When you drop a pebble into a pond, ripples spread out, changing all the water in the pool. The ripples hit the shore and rebound, bumping into one another, breaking each other apart. In some small way, the pond is never the same again.