Quotes from Afterworlds

Scott Westerfeld ·  599 pages

Rating: (16.7K votes)


“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.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds


“Being an author sucks, doesn't it? It's like telling a joke and nobody laughs for two years.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds


“Real life doesn’t have many happy endings. Why shouldn’t books make up the difference?”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds


“Hiding from the truth was worse than being lied to.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds


“You don't know what it's like, when your best friend disappears.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds



“You don't think happy endings are stupid anymore?"

"Your question is irrelevant," Imogen said. "This isn't the end.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds


“The best way to know a city is to eat it.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds


“Just remember, the things we write, they aren't always really us.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds


“First love is amazing and wonderful, but a kind of panic underlies it, a sense of not knowing what you're doing.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds


“Being fathomed was even better than being flattered, it turned out.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds



“Sleep is a little slice of death.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds


“In a novel you always knew the moment when something Happened, when someone Changed. But real life was full of gradual, piecemeal, continuous transformation. It was full of accidents and undefineables, and things that just happened on their own. The only certainty was 'It's complicated,' whether or not unicorns tolerated your touch.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds


“...but loving had left her skinless.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds


“The universe is math on fire.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds


“Blurbs don’t work anymore!” was another. “You should make sure that the quotable lines of dialogue in your book never exceed a hundred and forty characters!” seemed at best debatable.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds



“For me, writing's the only thing that's always real. I've never regretted a day I wrote a good scene, whatever else I screwed up that day. That's what's fucking real.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds


“Adulation is like rain. You can only get so wet.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds


“Nice concept. But is it a trilogy or a tweet?" "I can't tell any more.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds


“The scent of a faraway place lay on my skin.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds


“Looking for a thousand years is worth it, if in the end you find what you need.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds



“Mindy had explained that a lot of things had ghosts, not just people. Animals, machines, even things as vast as a paved-over forest or as humble as the smell of good cooking could leave traces of themselves behind. The world was haunted by the past.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds


“Maybe that was the point of truth-you could erase it all you wanted, and it was there was to be discovered again.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds


“Maybe that was the point of truth--you could erase it all you wanted, and it was there to be discovered again”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds


“More lies, but maybe lies were better than the truth.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds


“It’s just . . . it feels like someone’s going to ask me for ID. Like, writer ID.” The”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds



“Happy endings are popular. Do you not watch movies?"

"Yeah, but that's movies," Darcy groaned. "Books are above all that!”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds


“the things we write, they aren’t always really us.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds


“I'm here to learn. And what you have taught me is to avoid love as long as possible.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds


“The opening chapter was the book's unique selling point, the singular idea that had carried Darcy through last November, and Coleman had just come up with it off the top of his head.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds


“She would find her answers in the words she wrote, in the stories she told, not by asking for permission.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Afterworlds



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About the author

Scott Westerfeld
Born place: in Dallas, Texas, The United States
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Popular quotes

“connection between skin color and sunlight. The results were as clear as the sky on a cloudless day—there was a near-constant correlation between skin color and sunlight exposure in populations that had remained in the same area for 500 years or more. They even produced an equation to express the relationship between a given population’s skin color and its annual exposure to ultraviolet rays. (If you’re feeling adventurous, the equation is W = 70-AUV/10. W represents relative whiteness and AUV represents annual ultraviolet exposure. The 70 is based on research that indicates that the whitest possible skin—the result of a population that received zero exposure to UV—would reflect about 70 percent of the light directed at it.)”
― Sharon Moalem, quote from Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease


“I am, of course, aware that for over two hundred years scholars have laboured to keep history and theology, or history and faith, at arm’s length from one another. There is a good intention behind this move: each of these disciplines has its own proper shape and logic, and cannot simply be turned into a branch of the other.”
― N.T. Wright, quote from The Resurrection of the Son of God


“Einstein himself summed it up thus: ‘The “Principle of Relativity” in its widest sense is contained in the Statement: The totality of physical phenomena is of such a character that it gives no basis for the introduction of the concept of “absolute motion”; or, shorter but less precise: There is no absolute motion.”
― Paul Johnson, quote from Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties


“I write not for sensation, but for Truth. I leave judgement to the hearts of my good Readers everywhere.”
― David Ebershoff, quote from The 19th Wife


“When human beings give their heartfelt allegiance to and worship that which is not God, they progressively cease to reflect the image of God. One of the primary laws of human life is that you become like what you worship; what’s more, you reflect what you worship not only to the object itself but also outward to the world around. Those who worship money increasingly define themselves in terms of it and increasingly treat other people as creditors, debtors, partners, or customers rather than as human beings. Those who worship sex define themselves in terms of it (their preferences, their practices, their past histories) and increasingly treat other people as actual or potential sex objects. Those who worship power define themselves in terms of it and treat other people as either collaborators, competitors, or pawns. These and many other forms of idolatry combine in a thousand ways, all of them damaging to the image-bearing quality of the people concerned and of those whose lives they touch.”
― N.T. Wright, quote from Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church


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