Quotes by Neal Shusterman

...Our conversation with the supermarket manager had been about as helpful as a New Jersey road sign, and if youve ever been there, you know the signs dont tell you the exit youre coming up to, they only point out the exits youve just missed. It puts parents in very foul moods--and since youre probably there to visit relatives, their mood was pretty touch and go to begin with.

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 hell never let them go.

The accountant lingers at his childrens doorway a moment more, listening to the easy rhythm of their breathing, and something cold moves through him, like the passage of a ghost - but he know thats not it. Its more like the portent of a future. A future that must never come to pass......and for the first time, he gives rise to a thought that is silently echoed in millions of homes that night. My God... what have we done?

This book is so interesting. I always wonder whats going to happen next.

does a sick society get so used to its illness that it cant remember being well? what if the memory is too dangerous for the people who like things the way they are?

Which side was I on? There was no time to search for answers. All I could do now was ride on a werewolfs back, toward a destiny as hidden as the dark side of the moon.

Sometimes the darkness beyond is not glorious at all, it truly is an absolute absence of light. A clawing, needy tar that pulls you down. You drown but you dont. It turns you to lead so you sink faster in its viscous embrace. It robs you of hope and even the memory of hope. It makes you think youve always felt like this, and theres no place to go but down, where it slowly, ravenously digests your will, distilling it into the ebony crude of nightmares. 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 cant 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 cant take it and how did you ever think you could? And there is the dance; strength and weakness, confidence and desolation.

We move in and out of darkness and light all our lives. Right now Im pleased to be in the light.

When he touches a wall the ooze grows thicker, drawn to his and as if hes become a gravity well for the darkness - and it occurs to me that the dark must be in love with the light. Yet one must always kill the other.

You cant imagine what its like to be torn between darkness and light- to be a traitor no matter what move you make. If my grandmother and Marissa died tonight, it would be because I had stayed in the darkness too long, flirting with the idea of being Cedrics consigliere. If that happened, I could never live with myself- but if Cedric gave me the bite as he planned, I would be forced to live with it forever. That was the worst hell I could imagine.

Dreams can twist your emotions like no reality can.

But remember that good intentions pave many roads. Not all of them lead to hell.

And I think, if thoughts are worth a penny, how much less promises must be worth. Especially the ones youre likely to break.

I came running down the stairs that morning, like it was Christmas. My parents were already up. In my family, presents never waited; they were there upon waking. Our family has a problem with what they called delayed gratification. We want what we want when we want it, and we always want it now.

Suddenly, Taras accomplishment was clear. She had lined up allies among the schools various groups and got them all to work together for probably the first time in the schools history. She was like a master builder who could bend materials like stone and steel and clay to her will... except her materials were flesh and spirit.

Sometimes, though, you make a pact with yourself. Ill pretend theres nothing wrong if you pretend theres nothing wrong. Its called denial, and its one of the strongest pacts in the world. Just ask all those people who were still drinking champagne while the Titanic went down.

On my fifteenth birthday, I came to realize that the expression spoiled rotten meant exactly that. We kids were the apples of our parents eyes, and I, for one, was rotting from inside out.

The measure of a man is not how much he suffers in the test, but how he comes out at the end.

It does, Tennyson, because there’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance. There’s a fine line between being assertive and being a bully. And you’re on the wrong side of both lines.

Id rather be partly great than entirely useless.