Top 500 Neal Shusterman Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “I can’t help what I have any more than you can help what you don’t.”

— Neal Shusterman

452. “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.”

— Neal Shusterman

453. “Okay. And what are your pronouns, Jeri?” Jeri found it refreshing that she asked so directly.”

— Neal Shusterman

454. “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.”

— Neal Shusterman

455. “People are vessels,” Jeri had said to her. “They hold whatever’s poured into them.”

— Neal Shusterman

456. “Impressive, isn’t it?” Divan says with pride. “I purchased it from a Brazilian artist, who has apparently made a career working in flesh. He claims his artwork is to protest unwinding, but I ask you, how much of a protest can it be if he uses the unwound for his art?”

— Neal Shusterman

457. “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.”

— Neal Shusterman

458. “Nothing awful is without its beautiful side.”

— Neal Shusterman

459. “Apparently Quinn had woken up a short time ago and immediately asked for ice cream, knowing that kids in hospitals got whatever they wanted.”

— Neal Shusterman

460. “Important work,” Jeri quipped, “often loses the spotlight to self-important people.”

— Neal Shusterman

461. “You don’t so much sleep as borrow eight hours from death.”

— Neal Shusterman

462. “The weird thing is, hearing stories like this makes me feel a kind of kinship with the Almighty, because it proves that even God has psychotic episodes.”

— Neal Shusterman

463. “I feel as if my entire life depends on my holding it together.”

— Neal Shusterman

464. “The best we can hope for is to be humble in our arrogance.”

— Neal Shusterman

465. “Love, Allie concluded, wasn’t blind, it simply saw alternate dimensions.”

— Neal Shusterman

466. “Then she offers him a slim but sincere smile, and he reluctantly returns it. It doesn’t bridge the gap between them, but at least it marks the spot where the bridge might be built.”

— Neal Shusterman

467. “In this world, there is a fine line between enlightenment and brain damage.”

— Neal Shusterman

468. “I don’t want to be empty on the inside.”

— Neal Shusterman

469. “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

470. “I’m just saying that if we stopped fighting for lost causes, where would we be?”

— Neal Shusterman

471. “Never lose your humanity,” Scythe Faraday had told him, “or you’ll be nothing more than a killing machine.” He had used the word “killing” rather than “gleaning.” Rowan hadn’t thought much of it at the time, but now he understood; it stopped being gleaning the moment one became desensitized to the act.”

— Neal Shusterman

472. “Today he failed to change the world. As for tomorrow, who can tell?”

— Neal Shusterman

473. “People would cheer throw confetti and then go about breaking the resolutions they had made only moments before.”

— Neal Shusterman

474. “The hiss of waves breaking at her ankles is a gentle sigh, as if the sea itself has found lasting contentment.”

— Neal Shusterman

475. “Tyger might have thought of himself as a free spirit, but he wasn’t at all. He just defined the dimensions of his own cage.”

— Neal Shusterman

476. “In fact, in the grand scheme of things, everyone was equally useless.”

— Neal Shusterman

477. “What does she fear in idleness?”

— Neal Shusterman

478. “And everyone else was selecting their leaders not by their ability to lead, but by where they stood on a single issue.”

— Neal Shusterman

479. “He has no choice but to believe, because losing the hope of having hope would be unimaginable.”

— Neal Shusterman

480. “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

481. “Revelations are never convenient, and always annoying.”

— Neal Shusterman

482. “I conclude it would be a good place to be alone with my thoughts, but I should already know that my thoughts are never alone.”

— Neal Shusterman

483. “What happened to you was a crime. I can’t change that. What I can do is teach you to live with dignity.”

— Neal Shusterman

484. “The two of them playact with each other, pretending to be cordial, but only so it will make the final betrayal even sweeter.”

— Neal Shusterman

485. “Rumors are like rain through an old roof. The effort of finding the source is greater than the cost of a new roof.”

— Neal Shusterman

486. “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.”

— Neal Shusterman

487. “So we make decisions and base our lives on those decisions, never realizing we’re only seeing one-tenth of the whole. Then we cling to our narrow conclusions like our lives depend on it.”

— Neal Shusterman

488. “Morrison kept looking to everyone else, probably hoping someone would provide him with an opinion, because he wasn’t ready to have one of his own.”

— Neal Shusterman

489. “Sometimes prejudice can be slapped upside the head by tolerance.”

— Neal Shusterman

490. “You must stop these reckless surrenders to your momentary moods.”

— Neal Shusterman

491. “Mom removed all games that remotely suggest violence and death-but Cody’s doing a good job of making harmless cartoon characters suffer in fresh and inventive ways.”

— Neal Shusterman

492. “I have no doubt that, one way or another, you’ll fill the empty spaces left behind.”

— Neal Shusterman

493. “It wasn’t just that he didn’t see the big picture, sometimes he saw a different picture entirely.”

— Neal Shusterman

494. “Can I believe in that God too?”

— Neal Shusterman

495. “Who he was and who he will be are connected only by the fine, nearly invisible thread of who he is now.”

— Neal Shusterman

496. “Makes sense, the earth is quick to consume the flesh of things that ain’t natural.”

— Neal Shusterman

497. “Noncommittal is rampant among the committed.”

— Neal Shusterman

498. “He had to live long enough to forge a purpose greater than that.”

— Neal Shusterman

499. “She has no way of knowing that what occurred in his crate was a reenactment of what happened in her own, and in almost every other container on the plane. Fear, misgivings, questions rarely asked, and stories rarely told. The details are different, of course, as are the players, but the gist is the same. No one will discuss these things again, or even acknowledge having ever discussed them at all, but because of it, invisible bonds have been forged.”

— Neal Shusterman

500. “I must be doing something right if the crazies think I’m as powerful as the Antichrist.”

— Neal Shusterman