Top 500 Neal Shusterman Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “That which we name takes greater weight than the sea it displaces. Ask any shipwreck.”

— Neal Shusterman

352. “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

353. “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

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

— Neal Shusterman

355. “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

356. “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

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

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

359. “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

360. “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

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

— Neal Shusterman

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

— Neal Shusterman

363. “He put the ring away, and Rowan let out his breath, not even realizing he had been holding it.”

— Neal Shusterman

364. “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

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

— Neal Shusterman

366. “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

367. “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

368. “Cuando uno no puede ganar, lo mejor es que haga un chiste de la derrota.”

— Neal Shusterman

369. “I guess once you start parting with all the things you think hold your life together, it’s hard to stop – and then you find out your life holds together all by itself.”

— Neal Shusterman

370. “Her eyes are open and her mind is somewhere else.”

— Neal Shusterman

371. “Genius serves no one if it never makes it out of your head.”

— Neal Shusterman

372. “It’s more than that now. I can’t tell the difference between what’s part of me and what’s not.”

— Neal Shusterman

373. “It was Rowan who had coined the term “lettuce-kid” to describe them. Both of them were born sandwiched somewhere in the middle of large families, and where far from being their parents’ favorites. “I got a couple of brothers that are the meat, a few sisters that are cheese and tomatoes, is I guess I’m the lettuce.”

— Neal Shusterman

374. “You’ll feel a tingling in your chest,” says a surgeon. “It’s nothing to worry about.”

— Neal Shusterman

375. “When, she wonders, did she stop being a child? The law says it was when she turned eighteen, but the law doesn’t know her.”

— Neal Shusterman

376. “How strange to actually have to see the path of your journey in order to make it.”

— Neal Shusterman

377. “All he ever wanted was a comfortable chair and a place in history. Well, he was robbed of one and died in the other.”

— Neal Shusterman

378. “What we perceive as art, the universe perceives as directions.”

— Neal Shusterman

379. “What’s the point of living forever if you can’t take a few risks?”

— Neal Shusterman

380. “You never realize the holes a person leaves behind until you fall into them.”

— Neal Shusterman

381. “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

382. “But it’s not going to happen today – and there is a deep, abiding comfort in that. Deep enough to carry me through till tomorrow.”

— Neal Shusterman

383. “Wars are often waged not because of what we believe, but because of the things we want others to believe.”

— Neal Shusterman

384. “Each day the sea is exactly the same. We seem no closer, and no farther from anything.”

— Neal Shusterman

385. “You know that feeling you get when your leg falls asleep? Well, I suddenly had that feeling in my spine. Like termites were chewing through the marrow in my backbone.”

— Neal Shusterman

386. “They were the screams of riders torn apart by the twisted reflections of their own inner selves.”

— Neal Shusterman

387. “The fact that it was not human meant that it could never understand certain things, in spite of its immense empathy and intellect. It couldn’t comprehend, for instance, that the terror of the unknown was just as awful, and just as real, regardless of whether or not there was truly something to fear.”

— Neal Shusterman

388. “Whether consciousness is implanted in us by something divine, or whether it is created by the efforts of our brains, the end result is the same. We are.”

— Neal Shusterman

389. “What do you do with a textbook case when no one’s written the textbook?”

— Neal Shusterman

390. “If love of money is the root of all evil, then having money is the root of all boredom. When you can have everything, you find there’s nothing you really want. When you can do anything, you find there’s nothing you really care to do. You become lazy. Life feels like a boulder you don’t want to lift.”

— Neal Shusterman

391. “My artwork isn’t evolving, it’s deconstructing, and I don’t know why.”

— Neal Shusterman

392. “But Morrison put up his hands in instant surrender. “Leave me out of this,” he said. “I’m not going up against Scythe Anastasia.”

— Neal Shusterman

393. “Suddenly it was obvious to Connor why they don’t teach it. Once education was restructured and corporatized, they didn’t want kids knowing how close they came to toppling the government. They didn’t want kids to know how much power they really had.”

— Neal Shusterman

394. “Good thing about bad rubbish is you can make the stench go away just by covering it up. It never comes back as long as you keep a tight lid on it.”

— Neal Shusterman

395. “Can’t you see? I don’t get to do ANYTHING I want! Because I’m too busy just trying to stay alive. And you come here with your fancy school uniform and your mother’s jewelry and your neighbor’s freaking car, and you think you can buy your way in? What kind of idiot buys his way into the bottom?”

— Neal Shusterman

396. “Well, this place was not purgatory, Nirvana, or any sort of rebirth, and it occurred to Nick that regardless of what people believed, the universe had its own ideas.”

— Neal Shusterman

397. “The exploration of possibility has always been the realm of science. The true scientist leave practical application to others.”

— Neal Shusterman

398. “We make mistakes. Believe me, if Goddard is installed as High Blade, half of the scythes who put him there will regret it in the morning, but by then it will be too late!”

— Neal Shusterman

399. “Sometimes we make our alliances not by the shape and color of our flesh but by the convictions of our heart.”

— Neal Shusterman

400. “Great tragedies have great consequences. They ripple through the fabric of this world and the next. When the loss is too great for either world to bear, Everlost absorbs the shock, like a cushion between the two.”

— Neal Shusterman