Quotes from Neal Shusterman

Appointments? You can't be serious. With all due respect, they have the cognitive capacity of chimpanzees right now.- -And if we want to change that, we will start treating them as human beings, not a mob of apes.-

There are about three hundred billion stars to a galaxy, and more than eighty billion galaxies in the known universe. That means that if only one in a million planets can support life, and one in a million of those actually has life, and one in a million of those planets has intelligent life . . . then there are at least one and a half million civilizations out there.

Carl was just saying goodbye, Mom said. Really, I said. He must speak in tongues.

if you paint wrong because that's the best you can do, you just a chump. But you do it because you want to? Then you're an artist.

Sometimes prejudice can be slapped upside the head by tolerance.

It began the night we died on the Kamikaze.

partake of this body

If the yacht's sails were wind-tattered, if its polished brass and varnished wood were scarred from a hundred successful voyages, it would have suited him, because character should always come before beauty.

I'm so thankful to be alive right now, he could take credit for the faked lunar landings and I wouldn't care.

You have the soul of a corporation, a teacher once told him. It was meant as an insult, but he took it as a compliment. Corporations have great power and do fine things in this world when they choose to.

I'm just saying that if we stopped fighting for lost causes, where would we be?

You will suffer the greatest agony of all, Goddard told him after he was revived from their final bout. You will be gleaned in the presence of the Grandslayers, and you will disappear. You won't be a footnote in history, you will be erased from it. It will be as though you never lived. I can see how that would be a horrifying thought for you, Rowan told Goddard. But I don't have a burning need to make my existence the center of the universe. Disappearing is fine with me.

A successful lie is not fueled by the liar; it is fueled by the willingness of the listener to believe. 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.

It was not exactly circular logic. More like spiral. An accepted lie that spun in upon itself until truth and fiction disappeared into a singularity of who the hell cares, as long as I'm happy?

I'm kind of bothered to be with Mackenzie right now, because she happens to be sucking on her favorite candy—a blue Ring Pop. It makes her look much younger than almost-eleven, and makes me feel like I'm a babysitter. It's also embarrassing to be around someone whose entire mouth has turned blue.

I was on my bike and got hit by some damfoo' in a Mercedes.

As we walk, I collect business cards for escort services from sleazy guys handing them out to anyone who will take them. Not that I intend to call the numbers on the cards, but it's something to collect.

Of course, if more people had been organ donors, unwinding never would have happened . . . but people like to keep what's theirs, even after they're dead. It didn't take long for ethics to be crushed by greed.

He was brilliant at finding shapes in the clouds of his fury.

What if one of these scummy guys on the street decides he's tired of handing out dirty business cards, and decides that a little arson is in order. And when I look at one of them—really look at him, I see it in his face, and I know that he's the one. I've gotten a powerful premonition, almost like a voice, telling me I can't go back to our hotel.

He didn't just break her neck," Scythe Goddard pointed out. "He unflinchingly snapped her spine! Everyone heard it. I'm sure it woke up the scythes sleeping in the back row!" "Classic!" said Scythe Chomsky, guzzling his champagne down, not waiting for the toast.

We're all screwed," says our morale officer.

He looks at me with his one seeing eye, as wary of me as I am of him. His eye is bright and alert. More than alert, it seems to peer deeper than eyes usually do. I know that means he's "off.

when it's officially allowed through a one-way mirror, it's not called spying. It's called surveillance.