Neal Shusterman

No true hero ever believes that they are one.

He will only do the wrong thing when it's the right thing to do..

You're not actually falling for him, are you?" he asks her one day, on one of the rare occasions he can get her alone."I'll pretend you didn't just ask that," she tells him in disgust. But Connor has reasons to wonder."On that first night here, he offered you his blanket, and you accepted it," he points out."Only because I knew it would make him cold.""And when he offers you his food, you take it.""Because it means he goes hungry."It's coolly logical. Connor finds it amazing that she can put her emotions aside and be as calculating as Roland, beating him at his own game. Another reason for Connor to admire her.

Look behind you now.Do you feel in your heart a slight hastening of its beat, and a powerful sense that something momentous is about to happen?... Perhaps, then, this is the hour that Mary Hightower takes to the sky with thousands Afterlights heading toward Memphis.... Perhaps this is the moment that Nick, the Chocolate Ogre, arrives in the same city in search for Allie, only to find that he has no idea where to look.... Perhaps this is the very instant that a monster called the McGill arrives there as well, aching to ease his pain by sharing his misery - not only with his new minions, but with anyone he can.... And perhaps you can sense, in some small twisting loop of your gut, the covergence of the wrong, of the right, and the woefully misguided. If you do, then pay sharp attention to the moment you wake, and the moment you fall asleep.... For maybe then you will know, without a shadow of doubt, which is which.

I went home and tried to sleep, but couldn't, so I stared up at the moon, watching how it's trailing edge faded into darkness, so close to being full, but not quite there. A pregnant moon, Grandma called it. Full almost to bursting, and ready to give birth to something unthinkable.

When you drop a pebble into a pond, ripples spread out, changing all the water in the pool. The ripples hit the shore and rebound, bumping into one another, breaking each other apart. In some small way, the pond is never the same again.

I can't destroy things so beautiful.""Time will destroy them if you don't. Time destroys everything. But if you destroy them, it will mean something.

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.

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.

Those eyes of his just look up at me, pupils dilated in the diffused lights of the room. Wide, black pools, seeking out galaxies.

When you truly start to care about someone you become vulnerable to all sorts of things.

You tell your brother he's gonna pay for that car in silver.

...the Statue of Liberty's got this invitation: 'Give me your tired, your poor, your reeking homeless--''Huddled masses,' said Ira. 'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.'...Okay, fine. So like everybody in the old countries says, 'Hey, I'm a huddled mass,' and they all wanna come over.

Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem. In fact, a city is nothing more than a solution to a problem, that in turn creates more problems that need more solutions, until towers rise, roads widen, bridges are built, and millions of people are caught up in a mad race to feed the problem-solving, problem-creating frenzy.

I'm against solutions that are worse than the problem. Like old women who want their hair dyed the color of shoe polish to hide the gray.

First rule of motherhood, dearie: men are screw-ups. Learn it now and you'll be a whole lot happier.

I think all mothers are alike, regardless of cultural background, when it comes to illogical cleaning.

How easy is murder when one calls it by a different name? How much easier is it for the conscience to condone __eaping_ than __illing___nd when one knows that death isn__ the end, does it stop the killing hand for fear of retribution, or does it simply make it easier to kill, because, if life continues, how can murder be murder at all?