Scott Westerfeld

“Sure, zombies can “be a metaphor.” They can represent the oppressed, as in Land of the Dead, or humanity’s feral nature, as in 28 Days. Or racial politics or fear of contagion or even the consumer unconscious (Night of the Living Dead, Resident Evil, Dawn of the Dead). We could play this game all night.But really, zombies are not “supposed to be metaphors.” They’re supposed to be friggin’ zombies. They follow the Zombie Rules: they rise from death to eat the flesh of the living, they shuffle in slow pursuit (or should, anyway), and most important, they multiply exponentially. They bring civilization down, taking all but the most resourceful, lucky and well-armed among us, whom they save for last. They make us the hunted; all of us.That’s the stuff zombies are supposed to do. Yes, they make excellent symbols, and metaphors, and have kick-ass mythopoeic resonance to boot. But their main job is to follow genre conventions, to play with and expand the Zombie Rules, to make us begin to see the world as a place colored by our own zombie contingency plans. […]Stories are the original virtual reality device; their internal rules spread out into reality around us like a bite-transmitted virus, slowly but inexorably consuming its flesh. They don’t just stand around “being metaphors” whose sole purpose is to represent things in the real world; they eat the real world.”

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

“History would indicate that the majority of people have always been sheep.”

“Bubbly is bogus.”

“And here's what I realized: You Sly Girls don't cry when you watch the big-face parties on the feeds, just because you weren't invited. You don't stay friends with people you hate, just to bump your face rank. And even though nobody knows what you're doing out here, you don't feel invisible at all. Do you?No one answered, but they were listening.Fame is radically stupid, that's all. So I want to try something else.”

“Sometimes Tally felt she could almost accept brain damage if it meant a life without reconstituted noodles.”

“Becoming pretty doesn't just change the way you look," she said. "No," David said. "It changes the way you think.”

“The physical beauty…also cleared her mind of worries. Every day seemed to change the mountain, the sky, and the surrounding valleys, making them spectacular in a completely new way. Nature, at least, didn’t need an operation to be beautiful. It just was.”

“Hi guys the book Im reading right this moment is called Uglies”

“The beauty of the world…has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (part 3, Pretties)”

“Maybe that was why she was helping Madeleine. She was a manipulative bitch, but Dess couldn't imagine living in any other reality than the one those manipulations had created. In a way, Dess owed the old mindcaster something. Like her life, such as it was.”

“It's just been a long week, that's all.""It's monday night, Jess.""My point exactly.”

“Fate didn't care a squick about what anybody was meant to do.”

“Make a list of all the varieties of aliens you can come up with. (And if it's less than 3,000, then THE PEARS ARE LAUGHING AT YOU, MY FRIEND.)" -Scott Westerfeld from NaNoWriMo Pep Talk.”

“The Shrink always warned me that carriers stay wracked with lifelong guilt. It's not an uplifting thing having turned lovers into monsters. We feel bad that we haven't turned into monsters ourselves--survivor's guilt, that's called. And we feel a bit stupid that we didn't notice our own symptoms earlier. I mean, I'd been sort of wondering why the Atkins diet was giving me night vision. But that hadn't seemed like something to worry about...”

“I'm not the one going for a biology degree. I'm just a philosophy major who eats people.”

“Two weeks of killer sunburn is worth a lifetime of being gorgeous”

“Maybe the natural world wasn't so jaw-droppingly horrible, appaling, nasty, vile. Sometimes nature could be quite sweet, really, as delicate as a confused and horny butterfly.”

“He and I have this... personality conflict. Namely, I think he should get a new one.”

“Weird, even for one of us. Or maybe she's worse.""Worse how?""Normal.”

“Maybe human beings are programmed...to help one another, even to fall in love. But just because it's human nature doesn't make it bad...”

“I took a rant-sized breath.”

“There was something magic in their large perfect eyes, something that made you pay attention”

“Not just your face was changed by the knife. Your personality— the real you inside— was the price of beauty.”

“MOST THINGS DON’T HAPPEN”

“Irony is always the best weapon against facism.”

“The world rests upon a turtle, which itself stands on the back of an elephant!”Alek tried not to laugh. “Then what does the elephant stand on, madam?”“Don’t try to be clever, young man.” She narrowed her eyes. “It’s elephants all the way down!”

“You’d best ask the lady boffin, sir,” Newkirk said. “Midshipmen aren’t allowed to have opinions.”

“Doing what you're supposed to do is always boring. I can't imagine anything worse than being required to have fun.”

“—Al hacerte perfecto, tu aspecto no es lo único que cambia —concluyó Tally.—No —convino David—. También lo hace tu pensamiento.”

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

“Life doesn't come with an instruction manual.”

“Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.”

“It's just the way things are." she shrugged. "It's no one's fault.""Or everyone's.”

“You and David could both be right. Maybe human beings are programmed … to help one another, even to fall in love. But just because it's human nature doesn't make it bad, Tally. Besides, we had a whole city of pretties to choose from, and we chose each other."-Zane”

“Lace: "Are you saying that your fat-ass cat has turned me into a vampire?"Cal: "Um, maybe?”

“You don't look very happy."Tally tried to smile. David had shared his biggest secret with her; she should tell him hers. But she wasn't brave enough to say the words. "It's been a long night. That's all."He smiled back. "Don't worry, it won't last forever.”

“Perhaps Clankers and Darwinists would always be at war, if only in their hearts.”

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

“That was one problem with dramatic exits: Sometimes they wound up making you look like a bubblehead.”

“I'm not sure what I am anymore... Sometimes I think I'm nothing but what other people have done to me―a big collection of brainwashing, surgeries, and cures... That, and all the mistakes I've made. All the people I've disappointed.”

“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!”

“God, you mean I lost my virginity to the apocalypse?"Morgan sighed again. "The whole thing was really embarrassing; my parents sent me to Brooklyn when they found out." She shrugged. "I thought I’d be safe in a gay bar, okay? What were you doing in there anyway?"Lace looked at me sidelong. "You were where?"I took a sip of beer, swallowed it. "I, uh, hadn’t been in the city...very long. I didn’t know.”

“She needed Andrew Simpson Smith, it was that simple. And he had spent his life training to help people like her. Gods. "Okay, Andrew. But let's leave today. I'm in a hurry.""Of course. Today." He stroked the place where his slight beard was beginning to grow. "These ruins where your friends are waiting? Where are they?"Tally glances up at the sun, still low enough to indicate the eastern horizon. After a moment's calculation, she pointed off to the northwest, back toward the city and beyond that, the Rusty Ruins. "About a week's walk that way." "A week?""That means seven days.""Yes, I know the gods' calendar," he said huffily. "But a whole week?""Yeah. That's not so far, is it?" The hunters had been tireless on their march the night before. He shook his head, an awed expression on his face. "But that is beyond the edge of the world.”

“She couldn't disappoint the whole village. There were no wallscreens here, no newsfeeds or satellites bands, and touring soccer teams were no doubt few and far between. (...), that made stories a valuable commodity, and it probably wasn't very often that a stranger dropped in from the sky.”

“Maybe she still was a pretty-head, making up irrational stories about the empty forest. The longer she stayed alone out here, the more Tally understood why the Rusties and their predecessors had believed in invisible beings, praying to placate spirits as they trashed the natural world around them.”

“...humanity is a disease, a cancer on the body of the world.”

“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 behend," David said. "It just takes a little surgery to do it.”

“The Rusty Ruins were the remains of an old city, a hulking reminder of back when there'd been way too many people, and everyone was incredibly stupid. And ugly.”

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