Quotes from Neal Shusterman

The dead have nothing left to them but a silent faith in that unknowable infinity - even if theirs is a belief that nothing waits but an infinity of infinities. Because believing in nothing is still believing in something - and only by reaching eternity will anyone know the truth of it all.

Suddenly it was obvious to Connor why they don't teach it. Once education was restructured and corporatized, they didn't want kids knowing how close they came to toppling the government. They didn't want kids to know how much power they really had.

The two of them against each other. The two of them against the world. Everything in their lives was now defined by that binary. If they had to die today in order to live, it would somehow be wrong if they didn't do it together.

And I think, if thoughts are worth a penny, how much less promises must be worth. Especially the ones you're likely to break.

You'll find in life, Caden, that many decisions are made by morons in high places.

In a population of hundreds of millions, such a small number of people is a mere drop in the bucket... but enough drops can make any bucket overflow

What can fingerprints mean when they're not necessarily yours?

They were the screams of riders torn apart by the twisted reflections of their own inner selves.

survival is a dance between our needs and our consciences.

This game's stupid, said Lief. Who the heck is Zelda, anyway?

There are times I feel like I'm the kid screaming at the bottom of the well, and my dog runs off to pee on trees instead of getting help.

She idly wonders which is crueler, man or nature. She determines it must be man. Nature has no remorse, but neither does it have malice.

Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem. In fact, a city is nothing more than a solution to a problem, that in turn creates more problems that need more solutions, until towers rise, roads widen, bridges are built, and millions of people are caught up in a mad race to feed the problem-solving, problem-creating frenzy.

When you truly start to care about someone you become vulnerable to all sorts of things.

Happiness is not a state of being. Happiness is a vector, it is movement.

So, says Lev, as casually as he can, you wanna dance? Do you believe in the end of the world? she responds. Lev shrugs. I don't know. Why? Because the day after that is when I'll dance with you.

What's the point of living forever if you can't take a few risks?

History is written by the victors--and when there is no victors, it all winds up in the corporate shredders.

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 so hard for me to imagine anymore.

Incredible. It never ceases to amaze Starkey how far society will go to protect the children it loves and to discard the ones it doesn't.

Innocence is doomed to die a senseless death at our own hands, a casualty of the mistakes we can never undo. So we lay to rest the wide-eyed wonder we once thrived upon, replacing it with the scars of which we never speak, too knotted for any amount of technology to repair.

That's exactly what the scythedom is: high school with murder.

The thing was, if I had found a way to escape- even for just a little while- I knew the pain would be there waiting for me when I got back.

Better to be numb than plagued by longing for something that could never be.