Neal Shusterman Quotes

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can make me think I deserved it.

It's amazing how words can do that, just shred your insides apart. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me - such bullshit.

A stick or a stone only stings for a minute. A name seems to hurt forever.

Sticks and stones will break our bones, but words will break our hearts.

Who will say with confidence that sexual abuse is more permanently damaging to children than threatening them with the eternal and unquenchable fires of hell?

Sticks and stones may break your bones but words can hurt like hell.

She had never dreamed there could be so much pain in a life when there was nothing physically wrong. She hurt all the time.

But persistent name calling? that prolongs hurt. It stretches out. Each nasty word stretches the rubber band further away until finally, one day, it snaps back at you with maximum impact

At such a moment, it is not the physical pain which hurts the most (and this applies to adults as much as to punished children); it is the mental agony caused by the injustice, the unreasonableness of it all.

Hope hurt more than the cold.

There are a thousand ways to hurt someone you love that have nothing to do with physical violence.

Keep in mind, hurting people often hurt other people as a result of their own pain. If somebody is rude and inconsiderate, you can almost be certain that they have some unresolved issues inside. They have some major problems, anger, resentment, or some heartache they are trying to cope with or overcome.

...This fear was unbearable. It unwrapped who she was, as neatly as he'd unwound her bandage, leaving too much pain and ugliness exposed. Nerve endings; he'd said they were the problem [causing phantom pain in the amputated limb]." Things that cut off, that ended abruptly or died--like parents and marriages--kept hurting forever.

Incurable wounds are those inflicted by tongue and eye, by mockery and disdain.

A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword.

Love and pain become one in the same in the eyes of a wounded child.

I was extremely timid and to be made to feel that I was not wanted, although in a place where I had every right to be, even months afterwards caused me sometimes weeks of pain. Every time any one of these disagreeable incidents came into my mind, my heart sank, and I was anew tortured by the thought of what I had endured, almost as much as the incident itself.

No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.

Being brokenhearted is like having broken ribs. On the outside it looks like nothing's wrong, but every breath hurts.

The words with which a child's heart is poisoned, whether through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later they burn his soul.

People say sticks and stones may break your bones, but names can never hurt you, but that's not true. Words can hurt. They hurt me. Things were said to me that I still haven't forgotten.

It's not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. The heart of a hurt child can shrink so that forever afterward it is hard and pitted as the seed of a peach. Or again, the heart of such a child may fester and swell until it is a misery to carry within the body, easily chafed and hurt by the most ordinary things.

It's the worst kind of cruelty — the thoughtless kind. You can't cope with it.

When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.