Top 500 Neal Shusterman Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “That’s exactly what the scythedom is: high school with murder.”

— Neal Shusterman

102. “I vow to become the change that might have been.”

— Neal Shusterman

103. “Had she lived, who knows what she might have done. Perhaps she could have changed the world and redeemed her family name. I choose to be Scythe Anastasia. I vow to become the change that might have been.”

— Neal Shusterman

104. “What must life have been like in the Age of Mortality? Full of passions, both good and bad. Fear giving rise to faith. Despair giving meaning to elation. They say even the winters were colder and the summers were warmer in those days.”

— Neal Shusterman

105. “The worst part about doing something inexcusable is that you can never take it back. It’s like breaking a glass. It can’t unbreak. The best you can do it sweep it up, and hope you don’t step on the slivers you left behind.”

— Neal Shusterman

106. “Anger is only our friend when we know its caliber and how to aim it.”

— Neal Shusterman

107. “They all think medicine should be magic, and they become mad at me when it’s not.”

— Neal Shusterman

108. “Ain’t no one gonna tell you what’s in your heart,” he tells Lev. “You gotta find that out for yourself.”

— Neal Shusterman

109. “Our hope is that Challenger Deep will comfort those who have been there, letting them know that they are not alone. We also hope that it will help others to empathize, and to understand what it’s like to sail the dark, unpredictable waters of mental illness.”

— Neal Shusterman

110. “While freedom gives rise to growth and enlightenment, permission allows evil to flourish in a light of day that would otherwise destroy it.”

— Neal Shusterman

111. “We’re exploring the possibility of building a wall to stem the exodus.” “Don’t be ridiculous,” Goddard said. “Only idiots build walls.”

— Neal Shusterman

112. “Is that why you’re here?” Ben blurted “To glean one of us?” Scythe Faraday offered an unreadable smile. “I’m here for dinner.”

— Neal Shusterman

113. “Without the threat of suffering, we can’t experience true joy.”

— Neal Shusterman

114. “Innocence is doomed to die a senseless death at our own hands, a casualty of the mistakes we can never undo.”

— Neal Shusterman

115. “How do you judge the brightness of a light when you’re the source? A spotlight can never see the shadows it casts.”

— Neal Shusterman

116. “Death makes the whole world kin.”

— Neal Shusterman

117. “Every Unwind believes in their heart of hearts that it won’t happen to them – that their parents, no matter how strained things get, will be smart enough not to fall for the net ads, TV commercials, and billboards that say things like “Unwinding: the sensible solution.”

— Neal Shusterman

118. “People aren’t all good, and people aren’t all bad. We move in and out of darkness all our lives.”

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

120. “Would the Thunderhead grieve our passing, I wonder? And if so, would it grieve as the child who has lost a parent, or as the parent who could not save a petulant child from its own poor choices?”

— Neal Shusterman

121. “You see demons in the eyes of the world, and the world sees a bottomless pit in yours.”

— Neal Shusterman

122. “Who am I? The sum of your dreams, the thrill you refuse to grasp, the unknown you fear.”

— Neal Shusterman

123. “Yesterday you were gods. Today you are mortal. Your death is my gift to you. Accept it with grace and humility.”

— Neal Shusterman

124. “Even now, she looked radiant to him. How ridiculous that he’d be romanticizing her in these final hours. What could have once been love was now the resignation of a heart long broken.”

— Neal Shusterman

125. “That’s what law is: educated guesses at right and wrong.”

— Neal Shusterman

126. “There are mysteries in Everlost. Some of them are wonderful, and others scary. They should all be explored, though- perhaps that’s why we’re here: to experience the good and the bad that Everlost has to offer.”

— Neal Shusterman

127. “We are imperfect beings,” Munira said. “How could we ever fit in a perfect world?”

— Neal Shusterman

128. “This is the true meaning of alone; Levi Jedediah Calder suddenly realizing he no longer exists.”

— Neal Shusterman

129. “Wasn’t it Jacqui who told us the human body is sity percent water? Well, now I know what the rest is. The rest is dust, the rest is ash, it’s sorrow and it’s grief... But above all that, in spite of all that, binding us together... is hope. And joy. And a wellspring of all the things that still might be.”

— Neal Shusterman

130. “Hope is a terrible thing to lose. Sometimes that wounded space gets filled with scar tissue, bitter, ugly, and angry.”

— Neal Shusterman

131. “They say you never know who’s the real hero and who’s the real coward until you’re looking death in the face. I’ve always been afraid of plenty of things, but fear isn’t what makes you a coward. It’s how depraved your heart becomes when fear gets pumped through it.”

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

133. “When the truth hurts we always hate the messenger.”

— Neal Shusterman

134. “Perhaps that is why we must, by law, keep a record. A public journal, testifying to those who will never die and those who are yet to be born, as to why we human beings do the things we do. We are instructed to write down not just our deeds but our feelings, because it must be known that we do have feelings. Remorse. Regret. Sorrow too great to bear. Because if we didn’t feel those things, what monsters would we be?”

— Neal Shusterman

135. “Yes, yes, but you have to remember people take from a situation the thing that they need.”

— Neal Shusterman

136. “I am legend. Yet every day I wish that I was not.”

— Neal Shusterman

137. “The longer we live, the quicker the days seem to pass. How troublesome that is when we live forever. A year seems to pass in a matter of weeks. Decades fly with no milestones to mark them. We become settled in the inconsequential drudgery of our own lives, until suddenly we look at ourselves in the mirror and see a face we barely recognize begging us to turn a corner and be young again.”

— Neal Shusterman

138. “Because rain is the closest thing I have to tears.”

— Neal Shusterman

139. “I wish you could have felt that slap I wish you could feel the pain.”

— Neal Shusterman

140. “Permission is the bloated corpse of freedom.”

— Neal Shusterman

141. “So what happens when your universe begins to get off balance, and you don’t have any experience with bringing it back to center? All you can do is fight a losing battle, waiting for those walls to collapse, and your life to become one huge mystery ashtray.”

— Neal Shusterman

142. “Everyone is guilty of something, and everyone still harbors a memory of childhood innocence, no matter how many layers of life wrap around it. Humanity is innocent; humanity is guilty, and both states are undeniably true.”

— Neal Shusterman

143. “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

144. “I wonder what life will be like a millennium from now, when the average age will be nearer to one thousand. Will we all be renaissance children, skilled at every art and science, because we’ve had time to master them? Or will boredom and slavish routine plague us even more than it does today, giving us less of a reason to live limitless lives? I dream of the former, but I suspect the latter.”

— Neal Shusterman

145. “Connor smiles, and Risa takes a moment to look down at the shark on his wrist. It holds no fear for her now, because the shark has been tamed by the soul of a boy. No – the soul of a man.”

— Neal Shusterman

146. “People are vessels,” Jeri had said to her. “They hold whatever’s poured into them.” And apparently Greyson had drained them and refilled them with something far more palatable.”

— Neal Shusterman

147. “A successful lie is not fueled by the liar; it is fueled by the willingness of the listener to believe. You can’t expose a lie without first shattering the will to believe it. That is why leading people to truth is so much more effective than merely telling them.”

— Neal Shusterman

148. “The Thunderhead had no arms to embrace. Even so, it could feel the beat of Greyson’s heart and the precise temperature of his body as if it were right beside him. To lose that would be a cause of immeasurable sorrow. And so night after night, the Thunderhead silently monitored Greyson in every way it could. Because monitoring was the closest it could come to embracing.”

— Neal Shusterman

149. “My grandmother used to say that twisting paths always cross again,” he told her. “And whose paths are more twisted than ours?”

— Neal Shusterman

150. “Time is never of the essence until someone decides that it is.”

— Neal Shusterman