Top 250 Scott Westerfeld Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Don’t worry,” he kept saying. “The overworld can’t hurt you if you stay calm.” I wasn’t calm at all. But my panic was like a poisonous snake at a zoo, staring at me from the other side of thick glass. Only Yamaraj’s touch on my arm kept the glass from shattering. His skin seemed to burn against mine.”

— Scott Westerfeld

152. “Everyone in the world was programmed by the place they were born, hemmed in by their beliefs, but you had to at least try to grow your own brain. Otherwise, you might as well be living on a reservation, worshipping a bunch of bogus gods.”

— Scott Westerfeld

153. “Maybe they didn’t want you to realize that every civilization has its weakness. There’s always one thing we depend on.”

— Scott Westerfeld

154. “I thought when he learned my secret, he would understand the ally I could be. But instead, he doesn’t even know who I am.”

— Scott Westerfeld

155. “Rex lost his specs.”

— Scott Westerfeld

156. “Nice concept. But is it a trilogy or a tweet?” “I can’t tell any more.”

— Scott Westerfeld

157. “Over his years of helping runaways to find the Smoke, David had encountered wild animals, forest fires, and bio-engineered poisonous plants. But nothing was more dangerous than a city afraid of change.”

— Scott Westerfeld

158. “Writers can live everywhere. It’s our superpower.”

— Scott Westerfeld

159. “Adulation is like rain. You can only get so wet.”

— Scott Westerfeld

160. “The Internet is global and seemingly omniscient, while iPods and phones are all microscopic workings encased in plastic blobjects. Compare that to a steam engine, where you can watch the pistons move and feel the heat of its boilers. I think we miss that visceral appeal of the machine.”

— Scott Westerfeld

161. “Nature was tough, it could be dangerous, but unlike Dr. Cable or shay, or peris-unlike people in general-it made sense. The problems it threw at you could be solved rationally.”

— Scott Westerfeld

162. “The sight of Ethan – of Scam, since this was a mission – sent a trickle of annoyance down Crash’s spine. Not like all the little itches of tech, just the ever-present need to punch him in the face.”

— Scott Westerfeld

163. “So what are those balloons for? In case you fall off your hoverboard?′ – Tally to Peris.”

— Scott Westerfeld

164. “More lies, but maybe lies were better than the truth.”

— Scott Westerfeld

165. “It’s exciting. But you can’t keep fighting the way things are forever.”

— Scott Westerfeld

166. “You don’t know what it’s like, when your best friend disappears.”

— Scott Westerfeld

167. “By plucking her petals you do not gather the beauty of the flower. – Rabindranath Tagore, “Stray Birds.”

— Scott Westerfeld

168. “Real life doesn’t have many happy endings. Why shouldn’t books make up the difference?”

— Scott Westerfeld

169. “Her parents didn’t understand that braille meant big clunky books that marked you as different, while audiobooks live invisibly on your phone and text-to-speech gave you the whole damn internet.”

— Scott Westerfeld

170. “This beauty would remain whether he was here to see it or not.”

— Scott Westerfeld

171. “A milli-Helen is enough beauty to launch exactly one ship.”

— Scott Westerfeld

172. “Your public-spiritedness is appreciated, I assure you.”

— Scott Westerfeld

173. “If Chizara was agreeing with Ethan, things were bad.”

— Scott Westerfeld

174. “Don’t. Shoot. The air is full of hydrogen!”

— Scott Westerfeld

175. “The thought of publishing – of the whole world reading Afterworlds – had always made Darcy feel naked and exposed, but loving had left her skinless.”

— Scott Westerfeld

176. “Without lesions making everyone agreeable, society was left roiling in a constant battle of words, images, and ideas. All around her Tally felt the city seething, all those unfettered minds bouncing their opinions off each other, like something ready to explode.”

— Scott Westerfeld

177. “Junkies might be easy to knock down, but they’re never fragile. They have souls like old leather shoes studded with steel, and they’re about as much good as friends.”

— Scott Westerfeld

178. “They broke things.”

— Scott Westerfeld

179. “I’ll tell him I astral-projected. Butt-head.”

— Scott Westerfeld

180. “I like my first lines short and declarative. No complicated sentences. Of course, that’s not really a Scott thing. It’s pretty classic grab-the-reader technique.”

— Scott Westerfeld

181. “This is the power of the Goliath, that no one on earth, Clanker or Darwinist, can escape. So we all must learn to share the globe, or perish together!”

— Scott Westerfeld

182. “Once you told yourself a story enough times, it was so easy to keep on believing it.”

— Scott Westerfeld

183. “As the serpentine expanse of glass drew open, the city seemed to wrap around them: rooftop gardens with stunted trees in pots, water towers like chunky flying saucers, the spires of distant skyscrapers.”

— Scott Westerfeld

184. “Sometimes I think I’m nothing but what other people have done to me.”

— Scott Westerfeld

185. “Darcy closed her eyes. Their lips met, and she breathed in the scent of the sun-heated tar beneath them and the salt of Imogen’s skin. She felt the rumble of the traffic below traveling up through the building and into her spine, her fingertips, her tongue.”

— Scott Westerfeld

186. “We’re too busy being special.”

— Scott Westerfeld

187. “Maybe that was the point of truth-you could erase it all you wanted, and it was there was to be discovered again.”

— Scott Westerfeld

188. “He took his own saber by the blade and handed it to Alek, pommel first, as if offering it to a victor.”

— Scott Westerfeld

189. “But books don’t happen by accident.”

— Scott Westerfeld

190. “Nate liked money. It was a sleek and clever invention, beautiful in the way it lubricated power and focused people’s attention. But it had a clumsy, brutal side, too. Money bludgeoned people without it into silence, shut them away in neighborhoods like this.”

— Scott Westerfeld

191. “If a meteor falls in the forest and no one realizes it, does it end the war?”

— Scott Westerfeld

192. “Just remember, the things we write, they aren’t always really us.”

— Scott Westerfeld

193. “But I feel more real when I’m around her. Like I’m not fading.”

— Scott Westerfeld

194. “I wonder if she ever wants to trade lives with me, if only for the chance to punch something.”

— Scott Westerfeld

195. “Dying is one of those things that can’t be fixed. Not by talking about it, not with all the brain surge in the world.”

— Scott Westerfeld

196. “Being fathomed was even better than being flattered, it turned out.”

— Scott Westerfeld

197. “Dess shook her head. “Before he walked off, Rex said for you to wait. He said it’s totally important you don’t touch Angie until he comes back. and he said that if you were a pain about it, I get to hit you with that.” She pointed to where the darkling had flung Flabbergasted Supernumerary Mathematician, its tip blackened by ichor and fire. “So, go ahead.”

— Scott Westerfeld

198. “For some of us, politics means fighting for our right to exist.”

— Scott Westerfeld

199. “Okay... That’s still blind-making.”

— Scott Westerfeld

200. “Mindy had explained that a lot of things had ghosts, not just people. Animals, machines, even things as vast as a paved-over forest or as humble as the smell of good cooking could leave traces of themselves behind. The world was haunted by the past.”

— Scott Westerfeld