Scott Westerfeld Quotes

The city has always been an embodiment of hope and a source of feeling guilt; a dream pursued, and found vain, wanting, and destructive.

Now that I can see it's the queen's new clothes Now that I can hear all your poison prose Now that I can talk with my tongue unfroze I'm not so sure of Santa or the buck tooth fairy There are no words for me inside your dictionary

It may be just one facet of your personality, or it may not even be a facet but only a pretension. You can show this false face with no problem when sometimes you meet on a sea beach, sometimes in a garden, sometimes under the moon and the stars, but when you really start living together then the reality starts surfacing. The real person is a hell and all that sweet talk that had happened under the stars becomes just lies.

Calvin: Somewhere in Communist Russia, I'll bet there's a little boy who has never known anything but censorship and oppression. But maybe he's heard of America, and he dreams of living in this land of freedom and opportunity! Someday, I'd like to meet that little boy... and tell him the awful TRUTH ABOUT THIS PLACE!! Calvin's Dad: Calvin, be quiet and eat the stupid Lima beans.

There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.

Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.

It’s my own fault, really. For believing in fairy tales. Not that I ever mistook them for actual historical fact, or anything. But I did grow up believing that for every girl, there’s a prince out there somewhere. All she has to do is find him. Then it’s on with the happily ever after. So you can only imagine what happened when I found out. That my prince really IS one. A prince. No, I really mean it. He’s an actual PRINCE.

Fools, your reward is neither here nor there.

Most loverspicture to themselves, in their mistresses, a secret reality, beyond and different from what they see every day. They are in love with somebody else--their own invention. And sometimes there is a secret reality; and sometimes reality and appearance are the same. The discovery, in either case, is likely to cause a shock.

When I turn the lights out, when I close my eyes, reality overcomes me, I'm living a lie.

When you eventually see through the veils to how things really are, you will keep saying again and again, this is certainly not like we thought it was.

Whatever we had is over. It died the minute I walked downstairs and realized the world I'd always known was a lie.- Blaire Wynn

The years after graduation hardened me into someone quite different from the strutting graduate who left campus that day headed for New York city, ready to offer the world his talent. The world, I discovered. was not all that interested.

I had been taught to look for monsters and devils and I found ordinary people.

I always seem to suffer some loss of faith on entering cities.

Be careful what you’re doing, because no one is ever who you want them to be. And the less you really know them, the more likely you are to confuse them with the girl or boy in your head

But don't think that it's a system or a culture or a state or a person that does the letting down. It's our expectations that let us down. It begins in the warmth of the womb and the discovery that it's cold outside. But it's not the cold's fault that it's cold.

Illusions are bound to be shattered

New York City is filled with the same kind of people I left New Jersey to get away from.

The technological age we're in now is the perfect forum for constant misdirection and constant distraction. I ultimately think it's a war to keep people from realizing the true nature of themselves and the true nature of life. All the things people are in pursuit of now, in 2014, are total illusions. It just destroys people's happiness.

Don't let appearances fool you. There's always only one reality!

People b'lief the world is built so an tellin em it ain't so caves the roofs on their heads'n'maybe yours.

Disillusionment means having no more misconceptions, false impressions, and false judgments in life; it means being free from these deceptions. Refusing to be disillusioned is the cause of much of the suffering of human life.

The sexes deceive themselves about one another: the reason being that at bottom they honor and love only themselves (or their ownideal, to express it more agreeably). Thus man wants woman to be peaceable--but woman is essentially, like the cat, not peaceable, however well she may have trained herself to assume the appearance of peace.

An illusion dissipated is an experience gained.