Neal Shusterman

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

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

I begin to wonder if David was like me. Seeing monsters everywhere and realizing there aren't enough slingshots in the world to get rid of them.

The scariest thing of all is never knowing what you're suddenly going to believe.

Everything feels right with the world......and the sad thing is that I know it's a dream. I know it must soon end, and when it does I will be thrust awake into a place where either I'm broken, or the world is broken.

If you think about it, the public perception of funky brain chemistry has been as varied and weird as the symptoms, historically speaking. If I had been born a Native American in another time, I might have been lauded as a medicine man. My voices would have been seen as the voices of ancestors imparting wisdom. I would have been treated with great mystical regard. If I had lived in biblical times, I might have been seen as a prophet, because, let__ face it, there are really only two possibilities: either prophets were actually hearing God speaking to them, or they were mentally ill. I__ sure if an actual prophet surfaced today, he or she would receive plenty of Haldol injections, until the sky opened up and the doctors were slapped silly by the Hand of God. In the Dark Ages my parents would have sent for an exorcist, because I was clearly possessed by evil spirits, or maybe even the Devil himself. And if I lived in Dickensian England, I would have been thrown into Bedlam, which is more than just a description of madness. It was an actual place__ __adhouse_ where the insane were imprisoned in unthinkable conditions. Living in the twenty-first century gives a person a much better prognosis for treatment, but sometimes I wish I__ lived in an age before technology. I would much rather everyone think I was a prophet than some poor sick kid.

It's kind of like religion. It gives us comfort to believe we have defined something that is, by its very nature, indefinable. As to whether or not we've gotten it right, well, it's all a matter of faith.

They all think medicine should be magic, and they become mad at me when it's not.

You see demons in the eyes of the world, and the world sees a bottomless pit in yours.

The fear of not living is a deep, abiding dread of watching your own potential decompose into irredeemable disappointment when 'should be' gets crushed by what is. Sometimes I think it would be easier to die than to face that, because 'what could have been' is much more highly regarded than 'what should have been.' Dead kids are put on pedestals, but mentally ill kids get hidden under the rug.

Centering, however, is easier said than done. This I learned from a ceramics class I once took. The teacher made throwing a pot look easy, but the thing is, it takes lots of precision and skill. You slam the ball of clay down in the absolute center of the pottery wheel, and with steady hands you push your thumb into the middle of it, spreading it wider a fraction of an inch at a time. But every single time I tried to do it, I only got so far before my pot warped out of balance, and every attempt to fix it just made it worse, until the lip shredded, the sides collapsed, and I was left with what the teacher called __ mystery ashtray,_ which got hurled back into the clay bucket. So what happens when your universe begins to get off balance, and you don__ have any experience with bringing it back to center? All you can do is fight a losing battle, waiting for those walls to collapse, and your life to become one huge mystery ashtray.

You see demons in the eyes of the world, and the world sees bottomless pit in yours.

What's going on? I'm in the back car of a roller coaster at the top of the climb, with the front rows already giving themselves over to gravity. I can hear those front riders screaming and know my own scream is only seconds away. I'm at the moment you hear the landing gear of a plane grind loudly into place, in that instant before your rational mind tells you it's just the landing gear. I'm leaping off a cliff only to discover I can fly... and then realizing there's nowhere to land. Ever. That's what's going on.

I suppose even a simple slogan can be twisted into whatever shape we want, like a balloon animal__e can even make it loop back around on itself, becoming a noose. In the end, the measure of who we are can be seen in the shapes of our balloon animals.

And you know the darkness beyond despair, just as intimately as you know the soaring heights. Because in this and all universes, there is balance. You can't have the one without facing the other. And sometimes you think you can take it because the joy is worth the despair, and sometimes you know you can't take it and how did you ever think you could? And there is the dance; strength and weakness, confidence and desolation.

Once in a while our school has half days, and the teachers spend the afternoon 'in service,' which I think must be a group therapy for having to deal with us.

It was at that moment he realized that his spirit was truly human once more. For he no longer remembered how to be alone without being lonely.

His existence had always been comfortable, he had always held a clear picture of himself, his duties, and his place in a world. He saw that world as a place so full of turning gears he had no hope of comprehending how things fit together, so why even try?Now things were different, however. Now he wasn__ just looking out from inside of the clockwork. Instead, he was actually seeing the final motion of the escapement__he ticking hands of the clock itself.And it was a doomsday clock.Both his feline and human instincts told him to let it be. It was not his problem, or his place to interfere. If the living world was destined to fall, let it happen, let it pass into history once and for all. Who was he to try to save it?But on the other hand, if the living world were lost, then there would never again be great cats to furjack . . . and couldn__ it be that hearing the actual ticking of the clock gave one the responsibility to stop it?