Top 500 Neal Shusterman Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Is it not the job of the gardener to shape the tree as much as possible? And shouldn’t branches that begin to reach unreasonably high be the first to be pruned?”

— Neal Shusterman

302. “Compound eyes confound lies.”

— Neal Shusterman

303. “Dreams can twist your emotions like no reality can.”

— Neal Shusterman

304. “I think about religion and how, once we because our own saviors, our own gods, most faiths became irrelevant. What must it have been like to believe in something greater than oneself? To accept imperfection and look to a rising vision of all we could never be? It must have been comforting. It must have lifted people from the mundane, but also justified all sorts of evil. I often wonder if the bright benefit of belief outweighed the darkness its abuse could bring.”

— Neal Shusterman

305. “Of course, the bad scythes weren’t all in the past. But instead of “bad” they were now called “innovative” and “forward-thinking.”

— Neal Shusterman

306. “How frustrating it is to have so much power, yet be so impotent to wield it when it counts.”

— Neal Shusterman

307. “I still can’t figure out if it’s bravery or cowardice to take your own life. I can’t figure out whether it’s being selfish, or selfless. It is the ultimate act of letting go of oneself, or a cheap act of self-possession? People say a failed attempt is a cry for help. I guess that’s true if the person meant it to be unsuccessful. But then, I guess most failed attempts aren’t entirely sincere, because, let’s face it, if you want to off yourself, there are plenty of ways to make sure it works.”

— Neal Shusterman

308. “The woman wears a floral print blouse with lots of leaves and pink flowers. Risa would like to attack her with a weed whacker.”

— Neal Shusterman

309. “More and more scythes are coming to enjoy the act of killing. Conscience is becoming a casualty.”

— Neal Shusterman

310. “Keep me warm. I have no warmth of my own- only what the sun brings me, and the sun is halfway around the world. Keep me warm.”

— Neal Shusterman

311. “You are only one boy, with one voice... If you keep trying to be a choir, you’ll lose that voice, and then who will hear you?”

— Neal Shusterman

312. “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

313. “This is how he always imagined- a dangerous place full of mystery and violent kids.”

— Neal Shusterman

314. “To live between the prospect of an unknown eternal sky and a dark, enveloping Earth must have been glorious – for how else could it give rise to such magnificent expression?”

— Neal Shusterman

315. “Rocks eroded into astonished faces.”

— Neal Shusterman

316. “The moment you’re loved, that’s when you got your soul.”

— Neal Shusterman

317. “An arrogant head of state gives permission to all nature of hate as long as it feeds his ambition. And the unfortunate truth is, people devour it. Society gorges itself, and rots. Permission is the bloated corpse of freedom.”

— Neal Shusterman

318. “Epiphanies are never convenient, and often arrive too late.”

— Neal Shusterman

319. “In the backseat Moose and Squirrel inhabited a pair of six-year-old-twins, and wouldn’t stop bickering and picking their noses. They were clearly in their element.”

— Neal Shusterman

320. “One could say, Ayn, that he has cast himself as Atlas. Which means the slightest shrug can shake the world.”

— Neal Shusterman

321. “All this time, Lev ever realized what he needed. He did not need to be adored or pitied. He needed to be forgiven. Not by God, who is all forgiving. Not by people like Marcus and Pastor Dan, who would always stand by his side. He needed to be forgiven by an unforgiving world.”

— Neal Shusterman

322. “I long for the luxury of being impractical.”

— Neal Shusterman

323. “Death doesn’t just make all the world kin, it makes all religions one.”

— Neal Shusterman

324. “There was no lane line, no net, nothin to keep them apart but the well of her will. But that kept losing bricks.”

— Neal Shusterman

325. “La humanidad es inocente; la humanidad es culpable. Y ambos estados son indiscutiblemente ciertos.”

— Neal Shusterman

326. “His life has been like a ballpark, hasn’t it? All lines, structure, and rules, never changing. But now he’s been hit over the wall into unknown territory.”

— Neal Shusterman

327. “We can put off things far more effectively than those doomed to die, because death has become the exception instead of the rule.”

— Neal Shusterman

328. “It’s that quirky kind of weekend feeling they write ridiculous sunny-day songs about. You know the ones – I’m sure they’re on your iPod even though you’d never admit it.”

— Neal Shusterman

329. “Best way to save humanity is to turn the monsters against one another.”

— Neal Shusterman

330. “I ask for guidance. And for courage. And I beg – oh, how I beg – that I never become so desensitized to the death... that it feels normal. Commonplace.”

— Neal Shusterman

331. “Scythe Curie seemed a mix of many emotions, but she folded them all away, like clothes that no longer fit, and closed the drawer.”

— Neal Shusterman

332. “She idly wonders which is crueler, man or nature. She determines it must be man. Nature has no remorse, but neither does it have malice.”

— Neal Shusterman

333. “On a sunny Tuesday – for it seems so many awful things happen on a Tuesday – six astronauts and one schoolteacher attempted to pierce the sky. Instead they touched the stars.”

— Neal Shusterman

334. “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.”

— Neal Shusterman

335. “So is darkness better than a heartfelt lie?”

— Neal Shusterman

336. “Beautiful is dangerous.”

— Neal Shusterman

337. “Why would anyone in their right mind want to be a teenager more than once? When.”

— Neal Shusterman

338. “To name her is to sink her,” he told me. “That which we name takes greater weight than the sea it displaces. Ask any shipwreck.”

— Neal Shusterman

339. “I know exactly what he means. I had overheard Poirot talking to my parents. He was using words like “psychosis” and “schizophrenic”. Words that people feel they have to whisper, or not repeat at all. The Mental-Illness-That-Must-Not-Be-Named.”

— Neal Shusterman

340. “That’s right, pick on Emby,” says Connor. “Show everyone just how low you are.”

— Neal Shusterman

341. “And so, as the mob backs away to give them space... as the riot police holster their weapons, standing down, and as Risa takes the podium, calming the crowd with a voice as soothing as a sonata, Connor Lassiter holds his family like he’ll never let them go.”

— Neal Shusterman

342. “With hardly any effort at all, she made me feel special. Just like all the other people she toyed with.”

— Neal Shusterman

343. “Adulthood can do the most horrific things to the best of people.”

— Neal Shusterman

344. “The mall was a mecca for a newborn street rat.”

— Neal Shusterman

345. “The dead have nothing left to them but a silent faith in that unknowable infinity – even if theirs is a belief that nothing waits but an infinity of infinities. Because believing in nothing is still believing in something – and only by reaching eternity will anyone know the truth of it all.”

— Neal Shusterman

346. “Do you know that if you take the books in an average school library and stretched out all those words into a single line, the line would go all the way around the world? Actually, I made that up, but doesn’t it sound like it should be true?”

— Neal Shusterman

347. “We can lie to ourselves, saying we believe one thing, and sometimes we convince other’s it’s true, with the hope that by convincing others, we can convince ourselves. Wars are often waged not because of what we believe, but because of the things we want others to believe.”

— Neal Shusterman

348. “Did Constantine actually just say that? Hell would be freezing over if the Thunderhead weren’t controlling its weather.”

— Neal Shusterman

349. “One thing yo learn when you’ve lived as long as I have-people aren’t all good, and people aren’t all bad. We move in and out of darkness and light all of our lives. Right now, I’m pleased to be in the light.”

— Neal Shusterman

350. “If I exist without form – a soul sparking between a billion different servers – could not the universe itself be alive with a spirit sparking between stars? I must sheepishly admit that I have dedicated far too many algorithms and computational resources toward finding an answer to this unknowable thing. – The Thunderhead.”

— Neal Shusterman