Top 100 Neal Shusterman Quotes
#1. #1) YOU ARRIVED HERE BY NECESSITY. YOU STAY HERE BY CHOICE.
Neal Shusterman
#2. It was at that moment he realized that his spirit was truly human once more. For he no longer remembered how to be alone without being lonely.
Neal Shusterman
#3. We weren't going anywhere, Nick said with a smile. He was trying to sound charming, but instead wound up sounding heavily sedated.
Neal Shusterman
#6. Hope is a terrible thing to lose. Sometimes that wounded space gets filled with scar tissue, bitter, ugly, and angry.
Neal Shusterman
#8. You Unwinds are all the same. You think that because no one loves you, then you can't love anyone. All right, then, if there's no one you love, then pick someone who needs to hear what you have to say.
Neal Shusterman
#9. In this world, there is a fine line between enlightenment and brain damage.
Neal Shusterman
#10. Most people have two emergency modes. Fight and Flight. But Conner always knew he had three. Fight, Flight, and Screw Up Royally.
Neal Shusterman
#11. But honey, there are some things that must never be said out loud.
Neal Shusterman
#12. The measure of a man is not how much he suffers in the test, but how he comes out at the end.
Neal Shusterman
#13. We are not the enemy," he says. "That's what the enemy always says.
Neal Shusterman
#14. The headmaster's tie turns into a noose again, preventing blood from getting to his face
Neal Shusterman
#15. 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.
Neal Shusterman
#16. I wanted to take everything I was feeling, put it in a cannon and aim it at him.
Neal Shusterman
#17. AWOL's most valuable commodity: hope. It's something in short supply for those who have been deemed not worth the sum of their parts.
Neal Shusterman
#18. His life was a festival of excess that could not be contained. Deafening music, eye-popping bright colors, sugar added to almost everything he ate. Quinn's life was a bullet in a barrel ready to explode.
Neal Shusterman
#19. Normally Connor would walk away from a conversation like this. His life is about tangibles: things you can see, hear and touch. God, souls, and all that has always been like a secret in a black box he couldn't see into, so it was easier just to leave it alone. Only now, he's inside the black box.
Neal Shusterman
#20. Preventative measures are the bane of spontaneous action," he said. "I prefer the glory of heroism amidst panic.
Neal Shusterman
#21. We'll never be ready. So I guess that means we're as ready as we'll ever be.
Neal Shusterman
#22. The Bill of Life was signed, the Unwind Accord went into effect, and the war was over. Everyone was so happy to end the war, no one cared about the consequences
Neal Shusterman
#24. Love turns a heart to crystal ... Much more valuable, but much more fragile.
Neal Shusterman
#25. He will only do the wrong thing when it's the right thing to do..
Neal Shusterman
#27. You have three hundred sixty-five days of immunity." And then, looking him in the eye, said, "And I'll be seeing you on day three hundred sixty-six.
Neal Shusterman
#28. You tell your brother he's gonna pay for that car in silver.
Neal Shusterman
#29. 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.
Neal Shusterman
#30. Sometimes, though, you make a pact with yourself. I'll pretend there's nothing wrong if you pretend there's nothing wrong. It's called denial, and it's one of the strongest pacts in the world. Just ask all those people who were still drinking champagne while the Titanic went down.
Neal Shusterman
#32. Eventually your body will learn the alliances it has to make with itself,' Kenny had said - as if Cam was a factory full of strike-prone workers, or worse, a clutch of slaves forced into unwanted labor.
Neal Shusterman
#33. On my fifteenth birthday, I came to realize that the expression spoiled rotten meant exactly that. We kids were the apples of our parents' eyes, and I, for one, was rotting from inside out.
Neal Shusterman
#34. I'd never want a piece of someone else's brain," Kele had said. "I mean, you don't know where it's been.
Neal Shusterman
#35. Forget solar energy - if you could harness denial, it would power the world for generations.
Neal Shusterman
#36. It starts with a mild weeping but soon crescendos into the same tortured sobs as his little brother, both of them wailing in a strange harmony of misery.
Neal Shusterman
#37. The good Lord wouldn't have put it in your heart if it wasn't right.
Neal Shusterman
#38. But remember that good intentions pave many roads. Not all of them lead to hell.
Neal Shusterman
#39. I have no idea,' he tells her, and there is such a spark in his eye when he says it, she can tell having no idea is exactly the way he wants it.
Neal Shusterman
#40. And so when the scar wraith approached him, he took a diagonal step backward putting himself behind Squirrel like a king retreating behind a pawn.
Neal Shusterman
#41. There's a quickening of her heart when she sees him. She tells herself it's anger.
Neal Shusterman
#42. Hope in the shadow of fear is the world's most powerful motivator.
Neal Shusterman
#43. I've had enough of organizations for a while, no matter how good the cause. I prefer being a free-agent rabble-rouser. Dan
Neal Shusterman
#44. There are few things he can stand less than a bunch of morons standing around looking at something that doesn't work and wondering who's going to fix it.
Neal Shusterman
#45. Dead kids are put on pedestals, but mentally ill kids get hidden under the rug.
Neal Shusterman
#47. Milestone! This is a momentous occasion," he tells her cheerily. "It should be witnessed by a friend."
She throws him an icy gaze, and he does a verbal back pedal.
"Aaaand since no friends are present, I'll have to do.
Neal Shusterman
#48. We longed for healing and happiness - as if happiness is a state of being. But it's not. Happiness is a vector. It's movement.
Neal Shusterman
#50. And when the abyss looks into you - and it will - may you look back unflinching.
Neal Shusterman
#52. 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.
Neal Shusterman
#53. When you know the future ... you can either let that future happen to you, or be the one to create it.
Neal Shusterman
#54. The captain is supposed to go down with the ship" . "unless the first mate knocks him out and throws him in a lifeboat
Neal Shusterman
#56. This book is so interesting. I always wonder what's going to happen next.
Neal Shusterman
#57. If every part of you is alive but inside someone else ... are you alive or are you dead?
Neal Shusterman
#58. "Keep your eyes on the prize," although I think he should have also said "Go after the prize," too; and maybe that's why prizes ever came his way, because all he ever did was look at them.
Neal Shusterman
#59. You must stop these reckless surrenders to your momentary moods.
Neal Shusterman
#60. 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.
Neal Shusterman
#61. It stands as an unspoken warning to everyy Unwind there. You will get with the program,or your stay here will be very, very, short. The lesson is always learned.
Neal Shusterman
#62. Anger is only our friend when we know its caliber and how to aim it.
Neal Shusterman
#63. There's a set of unspoken rules we live by when it comes to fighting. We can't help it. It comes from living in a civilized world. Even when you're fighting your hardest, somewhere deep down, you know how far you can go. But today the rules are gone. Today I fight not to win, but to destroy.
Neal Shusterman
#64. Do I look feeble to you"
"Actually, yes."
"Well, looks can be deceiving. For instance, when I met you, I thought you look reasonably intelligent.
Neal Shusterman
#65. In spite of my wisecracking, pain-in-the-ass ways, I was the clip that held things together. Unnoticed. Taken for granted. Okay, maybe I'm giving myself too much credit here, but I'd be damned if I was gonna keep on being the family paper clip.
Neal Shusterman
#66. I've found that human beings learn from their misdeeds just as often as from their good deeds. I am envious of that, for I am incapable of misdeeds. Were I not, then my growth would be exponential.
Neal Shusterman
#67. When it's officially allowed through a one-way mirror, it's not called spying. It's called surveillance.
Neal Shusterman
#68. I think all mothers are alike, regardless of cultural background, when it comes to illogical cleaning.
Neal Shusterman
#69. People like you because you've got integrity. Even when you're being an ass.
Neal Shusterman
#70. Who would have thought that the singular whole of her forgiveness was a more valuable gift than a hundred of her parts?
Neal Shusterman
#71. He also keeps his silence when Bible passages become shredded to justify unwinding, and kids start to see the face of God in the fragments.
Neal Shusterman
#72. I smell fear," he said with a quiet intensity. "But not nearly enough.
Neal Shusterman
#73. Truth is truth. Implications are subjective. People will hear your words and draw their own conclusion.
Neal Shusterman
#75. He's a conundrum- and there's still a piece missing from the puzzle. Whatever that piece was, there was a part of me telling me not to get involved- that it was too much to handle. That you shouldn't go out on a limb unless you're absolutely sure the limb can support your weight.
Neal Shusterman
#76. You don't go missing in a museum- you just get temporarily absorbed by the walls.
Neal Shusterman
#77. We're roughage," Tyger said. "If we don't cause a little intestinal distress, no one knows we're there.
Neal Shusterman
#78. So Connor stands there with secret anticipation each time there's a group of new arrivals, hoping beyond hope he'll find that self-righteous, self-important, pain-in-the-ass Lev still alive.
Neal Shusterman
#79. There are no wrong thoughts, only thoughts that need to be worked through and overcome.
Neal Shusterman
#80. If you come anywhere near my daughter, I will see to it that you are taken apart piece by bloody piece. Do I make myself clear?"
"Any clearer," says Cam, "and you'd be invisible.
Neal Shusterman
#81. The whole place is a petri dish of angst, generated by kids whose parents gave up on them, which is the worst kind of angst there is. There are fights and ridiculous posturing on a daily basis.
Neal Shusterman
#83. Survival is a dance between our needs and our consciences.
Neal Shusterman
#85. The way I see it, the impossible happens all the time; but we're so good at taking it for granted, we forget it was once impossible.
Neal Shusterman
#86. Best way to save humanity is to turn the monsters against one another.
Neal Shusterman
#88. The building was no warmer than the street outside, and it smelled like something died in there from smelling something else that died in there.
Neal Shusterman
#89. I thought 'UnSouled' would come in at around 400 pages, but it took 650 pages, and even then I felt like I was rushing the conclusion, so I asked my editor and publisher if I could divide it again. So a sequel became a trilogy, and the trilogy became a tetralogy - although we're not calling it that.
Neal Shusterman
#90. Being ignored has its advantages. Dignity doesn't grow under a microscoope.
Neal Shusterman
#91. I love writing music, but it seems I'm always writing words, so I don't get much time to do it.
Neal Shusterman
#92. what makes it funny to people is that it's a gross distortion of something very familiar. For
Neal Shusterman
#93. The question wasn't whether or not I cared about him; the question was, how much? I'm glad Tennyson didn't ask that, because then I'd have to ask myself; and I already knew the answer. I cared far more than was safe.
Neal Shusterman
#94. In a perfect world everything would be either black or white, right or wrong, and everyone would know the difference. But this isn't a perfect world. The problem is people who think it is.
Neal Shusterman
#95. I love you, Brew." "No you don't," he said. "Just shut up and take it," I told him. He smiled. "Okay.
Neal Shusterman
#96. You see demons in the eyes of the world, and the world sees a bottomless pit in yours.
Neal Shusterman
#97. Little Red, Little Red, what's in the chip bag, Little Red?"
And in the same singsong voice I answered, "Nothing at all, Nothing at all, Nothing at all but your grandpa's head.
Neal Shusterman
#98. Maybe that had been his plan all along, or maybe not. But one thing's for certain- now that I had said it, it was his plan.
Neal Shusterman
#99. Epiphanies are never convenient, and often arrive too late.
Neal Shusterman
#100. Then his eyes glazed over for a second. 'I go places sometimes,' he told me, his voice as thready as his eyes. 'Don't know why I go places ... I just do.
Neal Shusterman
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
