Scott Westerfeld Quotes

What you do, the way you think, makes you beautiful.

...I want those perfect eyes and lips, and for everyone to look at me and gasp. And for everyone who sees me to think Who's that? and want to get to know me, and listen to what I say." "I'd rather have something to say.

In a world of extreme beauty, anyone normal is ugly.

Nature didn't need an operation to be beautiful. It just was.

It didn't matter what you looked like. It was how you carried yourself, how you saw yourself.

The flowers were so beautiful, so delicate and unthreatening, but they choked everything around them.

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.

Left alone, human beings are a plague. They multiply relentlessly, consuming every resource, destroying everything they touch.

Reality had no gears, and you never knew what surprises would come spinning out of its chaos.

Ah. So he's forgotten the most important rule of warfare. Which is... That nothing ever goes to plan.

One of the most common questions writers are asked is "Where do you get your ideas?" But the sad truth is, we don't know. Ideas can come at any time and from any direction: in the shower, waiting for an elevator, or while bouncing across Wikipedia pages.

I'd watched too many schoolmates graduate into mental institutions, into group homes and jails, and I knew that locking people up was paranormal - against normal, not beside it. Locks didn't cure; they strangled.

"Clear-cutting" was the word for what the Rusties had done to the old forests: felling every tree, killing every living thing, turning entire countries into grazing land. Whole rain forests had been consumed, reduced from millions of interlocking species to a bunch of cows eating grass, a vast web of life traded for cheap hamburgers. "Look, we're not clear-cutting. All we're doing is pulling out the garbage that the Rusties left behind,” David said. "It just takes a little surgery to do it."

The lie took form as she spoke, pulling on as many strands of truth as it could reach.

Perhaps the logical conclusion of everyone looking the same is everyone thinking the same.

You see, freedom has a way of destroying things.

The human heart is a strange vessel. Love and hatred can exist side by side.

Luckily for writers - and unluckily for history - every scientific idea creates human conflict.

What did a happy ending even mean in real life, anyway? In stories you simply said, 'They lived happily ever after,' and that was it. But in real life people had to keep on living, day after day, year after year.

Making ourselves feel ugly is not fun." "We are ugly.

My name is tally youngblood and my mind is very ugly

Ring around the rosie. A pocket full of posie. Ashes ashes, we all fall down. Some people say that this poem is about the Black Death, the fourteenth-century plague that killed 100-million people... Sadly, though, most experts think this is nonsense... How can I be so sure about this rhyme when all the experts disagree? Because I ate the kid who made it up.

She looked at David closely, and the feeling was still there. She could see that his forehead was too high, that a small scar cut a white stroke through his eyebrow. And his smile was pretty crooked, really. But it was as if something had changed inside Tally's head, something that had turned his face pretty to her.

Good books make you ask questions. Bad readers want everything answered.

Plot idea: 97% of the world's scientists contrive an environmental crisis, but are exposed by a plucky band of billionaires & oil companies.