Top 500 Neal Shusterman Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 4 of 10

151. “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

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

— Neal Shusterman

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Neal Shusterman

156. “Would you rather die, or be unwound? Now he finally knows the answer. Maybe this is what he wanted. Maybe it’s why he stood there and taunted Roland. Because he’d rather be killed with a furious hand than dismembered with cool indifference.”

— Neal Shusterman

157. “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

158. “That’s wisdom you can take to the grave, and dig up when you need it!”

— Neal Shusterman

159. “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

160. “Being made to suffer pain frees us to feel the joy of being human.”

— Neal Shusterman

161. “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

162. “Lev had agreed to go with him because he knew the two tilled a need in each other. CyFi was like a preacher with no flock. He couldn’t exist without an audience, and Lev needed someone who could fill his head with ideas, to replace the lifetime of ideas that had been taken from him.”

— Neal Shusterman

163. “This is not going to be easy. I’m good at being bad, but I’m bad at being good. I don’t know the first thing about good deeds.”

— Neal Shusterman

164. “You should never apologize for existing, Lev. Not even to all those people out there who wish you didn’t.”

— Neal Shusterman

165. “Which is worse, Risa often wondered, to have tens of thousands of babies that no one wanted or to silently make then go away before they were even born.”

— Neal Shusterman

166. “You always have a choice,” he said, which was a half-truth if ever there was one.”

— Neal Shusterman

167. “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.”

— Neal Shusterman

168. “Ours is a perfect world – but perfection does not linger in one place. It is a firefly, by its very nature elusive and unpredictable.”

— Neal Shusterman

169. “You’ve hit the nail on the head, Anastasia. That’s exactly what the scythedom is: high school with murder.”

— Neal Shusterman

170. “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

171. “We move in and out of darkness and light all our lives. Right now I’m pleased to be in the light.”

— Neal Shusterman

172. “Outside the rain finally began to fall, surging in fits and starts. “I love the way it rains here,” he told her. “It reminds me that some forces of nature can never be entirely subdued. They are eternal, which is a far better thing to be than immortal.”

— Neal Shusterman

173. “It began the night we died on the Kamikaze.”

— Neal Shusterman

174. “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. Sometimes I think it would be easier to die than to face that, because ‘what could have been’ is much more highly regarded than ‘what should have been.’ Dead kids are put on pedestals, but mentally ill kids get hidden under the rug.”

— Neal Shusterman

175. “It was his mistake in thinking that a snake would choose to be anything but a snake.”

— Neal Shusterman

176. “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

177. “Everyone needs someone to blame.”

— Neal Shusterman

178. “It’s called loitering, which is like littering with human beings as the trash.”

— Neal Shusterman

179. “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

180. “Luck is for losers. You have history on your side. You have gravity. You have authority. You are the Granddame of Death.”

— Neal Shusterman

181. “He didn’t just break her neck,” Scythe Goddard pointed out. “He unflinchingly snapped her spine! Everyone heard it. I’m sure it woke up the scythes sleeping in the back row!” “Classic!” said Scythe Chomsky, guzzling his champagne down, not waiting for the toast.”

— Neal Shusterman

182. “She plays music to heal herself, but nothing can heal her brokenness.”

— Neal Shusterman

183. “Perhaps, thought Talon, there was a path in between. A way to shed their ignorance without losing their souls.”

— Neal Shusterman

184. “Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem.”

— Neal Shusterman

185. “She smiles at them as they go by and continues to play, making it clear that this furnace of a place, full of planes that cannot fly, is more than it seems. It is a womb of redemption for every Unwind, and fora ll those who fought the Heartland War and lost – which was everybody.”

— Neal Shusterman

186. “You can whisper, and people will still hear thunder.”

— Neal Shusterman

187. “There isn’t one single thing that will end unwinding. It will take a hodgepodge of random events that come together in just the right way and at just the right time to remind society it’s got a conscience. -Sonia.”

— Neal Shusterman

188. “The curb is the launching point for many a deed. To step off could be the start of a life-changing journey. On the other hand to push someone off could crush that person beneath the wheels of a truck.”

— Neal Shusterman

189. “I believed, in my arrogance, that I had a keen grasp of the big picture that others lacked. But of course, I was just as limited as anyone else. When I gleaned the president and his cabinet, it shook the world – but the world was already shaking just fine without me.”

— Neal Shusterman

190. “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.”

— Neal Shusterman

191. “That’s primordial ooze! It’s brimming with microbes! Back in the Age of Mortality, this single basin could have wiped out entire populations. It was called ’disease.”

— Neal Shusterman

192. “Top Ramen, my favorite comfort food – because it’s comforting to know that in the event of nuclear fallout, my food has enough MSG and preservatives to out-survive all of mankind.”

— Neal Shusterman

193. “Of course, the politicians, dictators, and warmongers weren’t happy, but their voices, which had always seemed so loud and intimidating, were suddenly insignificant. The emperor not only had no clothes, turns out he had no testicles either. The.”

— Neal Shusterman

194. “When your parents turn you in to the Juvenile Authority – and they will – I will not shed a single tear for you, Connor Lassiter.”

— Neal Shusterman

195. “What can fingerprints mean when they’re not necessarily yours?”

— Neal Shusterman

196. “Maybe it’s the best answer of all. If more people could admit they really don’t know, maybe there never would have been a Heartland War.”

— Neal Shusterman

197. “It does, Tennyson, because there’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance. There’s a fine line between being assertive and being a bully. And you’re on the wrong side of both lines.”

— Neal Shusterman

198. “Sometimes I think it would be easier to die than to face that, because “what could have been” is much more highly regarded than “what should have been.” Dead kids are put on pedestals, but mentally ill kids get hidden under the rug.”

— Neal Shusterman

199. “My friend, life can often be most brutal and unfair. Death is the same.”

— Neal Shusterman

200. “They will find whatever button will make you dance, and dance you will, no matter how hideous the tune.”

— Neal Shusterman