Quotes from Neal Shusterman

have found that building a sandbox around a domineering child, then allowing that child to preside over it, frees the adults to do the real work.

Nature is the sum of all selfishness, forcing each and every species to viciously claw its way to survival by snuffing others in the suffocating mire of history.

Credit is where credit is due and to honner the trixture whose illusions finally become true

everything can—and will—change in an instant. People, truths, whole realities. The trick is deciding if a certain change is good, or bad, or some other thing we don't yet have words for.

I still don't know much about art, but I do know that there are places inside of us?palaces of glorious light and caverns of unknowable darkness. Magical places filled with brilliant, unimaginable colors that we suffer to bring forth.

Top Ramen, my favorite comfort food—because it's comforting to know that in the event of nuclear fallout, my food has enough MSG and preservatives to out-survive all of mankind.

Have you ever considered how lonely it is to be the girl on a pedestal?

But... don't we get a say? Actually, said Cirrus, no.

You know, he said, his voice making me feel cold in spite of the heat, this city can get ahold of you and pull you back no matter how hard you try to climb out. Like a grave.

Sometimes I think it would be easier to die than to face that, because "what could have been" is much more highly regarded than "what should have been." Dead kids are put on pedestals, but mentally ill kids get hidden under the rug.

I've got a secret for you, she whispered with n unpleasant grin on her face, Something terrible is going to happen. Something terrible... and something wonderful.

It was easier to deal with Tennyson when he was fighting me; but having him on my side was frightening, because now I didn't know who the enemy was.

His life did not so much flash before his eyes, as slap him in the face

The very idea of schooling used to be about learning so that we could improve our lives and the world. But a perfect world needs no improvement. Like most everything else we do, grade school through the highest of universities, is just a way to keep us busy.

Marie," she said, "it's finally happened." "What has, dear?" "I've stopped seeing myself as Citra Terranova," she said. "I've finally become Scythe Anastasia.

What's that expression? The devil you know is better than the one you don't?

Epiphanies are never convenient, and often arrive too late.

Each day the sea is exactly the same. We seem no closer, and no farther from anything.

It's February, and the walls are halfheartedly hung with Valentine's Day decorations that are supposed to add a sense of festivity, but just seem sadistic, because in an all-boys' detention center, only a select few are finding romance this year.

Pain is weakness leaving the body." We

I'm going out to find her, to make things right, or atleast properly wrong.

She was deemed an unfit mother, in spite of the fact that she goes to the gym every day,' Hal once told me. . . .Beautiful people are often forgiven for many things--and maybe she's gotten through life that way, but I don't forgive her for anything--and I don't even know what awful things she's done other than showing a lack of parental fitness.

Indeed, nothing awful is without its beautiful side.

Wasn't that the greatest perk of a perfect world? That there were no limits to what a person could do or become?