Top 500 Neal Shusterman Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

304. “You think you want to know the secrets of the universe. You think you want to see the way things all fit together. You believe in your heart of hearts that enlightenment will save the world and set you free. Maybe it will. But the path to enlightenment is rarely a pleasant one.”

— Neal Shusterman

305. “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

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

— Neal Shusterman

307. “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

308. “I love you, Risa,” he says. “Every last part of me.”

— Neal Shusterman

309. “Beautiful is dangerous.”

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

311. “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

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

— Neal Shusterman

313. “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

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

— Neal Shusterman

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

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

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

320. “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

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

— Neal Shusterman

322. “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

323. “This game’s stupid,” said Lief. “Who the heck is Zelda, anyway?”

— Neal Shusterman

324. “There are many ways in which the “check brain” light illuminates, but here’s the screwed-up part: the driver can’t see it. It’s like the light is positioned in the backseat cup holder, beneath an empty can of soda that’s been there for a month. No one sees it but the passengers – and only if they’re really looking for it, or when the light gets so bright and so hot that it melts the can, and sets the whole car on fire.”

— Neal Shusterman

325. “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

326. “Tools are neither demonic nor divine. It’s all about who wields them.”

— Neal Shusterman

327. “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

328. “Putting me at the forefront of his thoughts drew out what little energy he had left, just as when I had focused on helping him – and I realize this is the true core of human nature: When we’ve lost the strength to save ourselves, we somehow find the strength to save each other.”

— Neal Shusterman

329. “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

330. “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

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

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

334. “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

335. “Then you’d better listen, because me sounding like Bronte is one of the signs of the apocalypse-and if the end fo the world is coming, good deeds could earn you Judgment day brownie points.”

— Neal Shusterman

336. “Crawley reached into the pocket of his fancy robe – a dinner jacket, I think it’s called. The kind of thing Professer Plum would wear before killing Colonel Mustard in the ballroom with the candlestick.”

— Neal Shusterman

337. “Truth can only be served from a scalding kettle; whether you blister or make tea is up to you.”

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

340. “Statistically speaking, there’s a better chance that some part of me will go on to greatness somewhere in the world. I’d rather be partly great than entirely useless.”

— Neal Shusterman

341. “We are not the enemy,” he says. “That’s what the enemy always says.”

— Neal Shusterman

342. “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

343. “I shouldn’t be here,” I appeal to the captain, wondering if I’ve told him this before. “I have midterms and papers due and dirty clothes I never picked up from my bedroom floor, and I have friends, lots of friends.”

— Neal Shusterman

344. “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

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

— Neal Shusterman

346. “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

347. “That which we name takes greater weight than the sea it displaces. Ask any shipwreck.”

— Neal Shusterman

348. “All his life there was only one thing Lec was allowed to believe. It had surrounded him, cocooned him, constricted him with the same stifling softness as the layers of insulation around him now. For the first time in his life, Lev feels those bounds around his soul begin to loosen.”

— Neal Shusterman

349. “I’m sure my parents must be proud. Or horrified. Or are bitterly arguing about whether they’re proud or horrified, and have already hired lawyers to resolve the dispute. -Hayden Upchurch.”

— Neal Shusterman

350. “I feel everything,” Calliope tells me as I rest in her metallic arms one night, suspended above an easy sea. “I feel not only the sails, but the hull. Not only the ship, but the sea. Not only the sea, but the sky. And not only the sky, but the stars. I feel everything.”

— Neal Shusterman