Top 500 Neal Shusterman Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “The moment you’re loved, that’s when you got your soul.”

— Neal Shusterman

302. “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

303. “We must always be careful of the actions we take, for there are always unintended consequences. Sometimes they are serendipitous, other times they are appalling, but those consequences are always there. We must tread lightly in this world... until we are sure of foot.”

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

316. “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

317. “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

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

— Neal Shusterman

319. “Beautiful is dangerous.”

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

325. “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

326. “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

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. “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

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

— Neal Shusterman

331. “The difference between you and me... is that when I look at the world, I see opportunity. When you look at the world, you’re just trying to find a place to urinate.”

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

333. “And he thinks that if his soul had a form, this is what it would be. A baby sleeping in his arms.”

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

— Neal Shusterman

336. “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

337. “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

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

— 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. “Things pass. Even big things. And when they’re far behind us, they don’t look as big anymore.”

— 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. “You’ll find in life, Caden, that many decisions are made by morons in high places.”

— Neal Shusterman

343. “We are not just AWOLS! We are not just parts! We are whole human beings-and history will look back on these times in shame!”

— Neal Shusterman

344. “Nothing stays wondrous forever. It’s human nature to grow accustomed to that which becomes normal, even if it’s a new shade of normal.”

— Neal Shusterman

345. “I am lost in every possible way-Lev.”

— Neal Shusterman

346. “Close enough to feel it, but not close enough to burn.”

— Neal Shusterman

347. “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

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

— Neal Shusterman

349. “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

350. “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