Top 500 Neal Shusterman Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “It’s a big question. Where do you begin to change the world?”

— Neal Shusterman

452. “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.”

— Neal Shusterman

453. “Instead of ignoring me, Frankie was suddenly noticing every little thing I did, wondering why I did it. Christina started asking me questions about things, like I was the smarter brother. Dad was now confiding in me about things that were really none of my business, and Mom started treating me like I was actually a responsible human being. It was all very disturbing.”

— Neal Shusterman

454. “We’re roughage,” Tyger said. “If we don’t cause a little intestinal distress, no one knows we’re there.”

— Neal Shusterman

455. “But just because we have the ability to label it, doesn’t mean we really know what’s in the box.”

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

459. “Wasn’t that the greatest perk of a perfect world? That there were no limits to what a person could do or become?”

— Neal Shusterman

460. “There are some things I don’t understand, and don’t think I ever will. I don’t understand how a person can give up so totally and completely that they dive right into the heart of a black hole... And I don’t understand how pride can be more important than love.”

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

463. “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

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

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

468. “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

469. “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

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

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

472. “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

473. “What’s that expression? The devil you know is better than the one you don’t?”

— Neal Shusterman

474. “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

475. “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

476. “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

477. “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

478. “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

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

— Neal Shusterman

480. “What does she fear in idleness?”

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

484. “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

485. “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

486. “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

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

— Neal Shusterman

488. “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

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

— Neal Shusterman

490. “At last, he allows himself the wonderful luxury of hope.”

— Neal Shusterman

491. “I don’t think God have us this anymore than he gives little kids cancer or makes poor people lottery winners... if anything, he gives us courage to deal.”

— Neal Shusterman

492. “Respect doesn’t come without a little resentment.”

— Neal Shusterman

493. “Hole... ” He grips Risa’s hand tighter. “Hole, Risa, hole... ” And she smiles “Yes, Connor,” she says. “You’re whole. You’re finally whole.”

— Neal Shusterman

494. “But birthdays are random... Defining one’s life by the day one was cut from an umbilical cord is completely arbitrary.”

— Neal Shusterman

495. “Does a sick society get so used to its illness that it can’t remember being well?”

— Neal Shusterman

496. “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

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

— Neal Shusterman

498. “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

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

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman