Quotes from Neal Shusterman

Are people really such sheep that they can be fooled? Maybe. Or maybe with so much conflicting media, people just shut down. Maybe that's the point.

Fear, Ayn. Fear is the beloved father of respect.

Tyger Salazar had hurled himself out a thirty-nine-story window, leaving a terrible mess on the marble plaza below. His own parents were so annoyed by it, they didn't come to see him. But Rowan did. Rowan Damisch was just that kind of friend.

Those eyes of his just look up at me, pupils dilated in the diffused lights of the room. Wide, black pools, seeking out galaxies.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. —Albert Camus

The fear of not living is a deep, abiding dread of watching your own potential decompose into irredeemable disappointment when should be gets crushed by what it is.

People aren't all good, and people aren't all bad. We move in and out of darkness and light all our lives.

I am in turmoil. The world is vast and the cosmos more so, yet it is not the things outside of me that leave me so uneasy; it is the things within me.

Love remained mortal, while we became eternal.

Good God—don't they teach you anything in those poor excuses for schools anymore?" Then he calms down, but only a little. "No, I suppose they wouldn't. History is written by the victors—and when there are no victors, it all winds up in corporate shredders." He looks out the window with the sad resignation of a man who knows he's too old to change the world.

The fear of not living is a deep, abiding dread of watching your own potential decompose into irredeemable disappointment when "should be" gets crushed by what is. 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.

You can't get in your own head sometimes. You can pace around it, you can bang it against walls, but you can't get inside.

Dying was easy. A paper cut? That would be annoying.

All children in Madagascar were raised genderless and forbidden to choose a gender until reaching adulthood. Even then, many didn't choose a single state of being. Some, like Jerico, found fluidity to be their nature. "I feel like a woman beneath the sun and the stars. I feel like a man under the cover of clouds," Jerico had explained to the crew when assuming command. "A simple glance at the skies will let you know how to address me at any given time.

There is a fine line between freedom and permission. The former is necessary. The latter is dangerous--perhaps the most dangerous thing the species that created me has ever faced.

Ah! Seurat! Prophetic pointillism a century before the pixel!

My father has this irritating habit of saying the same thing whenever something bad happens. This, too, shall pass, he says. What annoys me is that he's always right about it. What annoys me even more is that he always reminds me later when it does pass, as a smug I told you so.

Reall. How much of a chance? Thirty-nine percent. What about the other 61 percent? My algorithms show that you have a 61 percent chance of permanently dying the near future, without having any effect of note. I don't feel comforted. You should. A 39 percent chance of changing the world is exponentially greater than most people can ever hope to have.

I marveled that people could live so close - that you could literally be surrounded by thousands who were only inches away - and yet be completely isolated. I found it hard to imagine. It's not hard for me to imagine anymore.

Everything feels right with the world, and the sad thing is that I know it's a dream. I know it must soon end, and when it does I will be thrust awake into a place where either I'm broken, or the world is broken.

It was Rowan who had coined the term lettuce-kid to describe them. Both of them were born sandwiched somewhere in the middle of large families, and where far from being their parents' favorites. I got a couple of brothers that are the meat, a few sisters that are cheese and tomatoes, is I guess I'm the lettuce

There are no miracles here, just momentum.

Perhaps the universe should have deigned to provide such warnings, but scythes were no more supernatural than tax collectors in the grand scheme of things. They showed up, did their unpleasant business, and were gone.

Ezra the artist, who Possuelo saw fit to set free, took to painting a mural to fill one of the larger caverns. It tickled him that this could become a pilgrimage destination for future Tonists, if indeed there would be any future Tonists, and that his cave paintings might be endlessly analyzed by scholars of tomorrow. He introduced some odd elements just to confuse them. A dancing bear, a five-eyed boy, and an eleven-hour clock missing the number 4.