Quotes from The Emperor's Code

Gordon Korman ·  190 pages

Rating: (38.5K votes)


“Oh, no-" They weren't even on the runway, and Jonah's father was already immersed in his BlackBerry. "Remember those 'Live Large with the Wiz Generation' posters? Well, guess how that translates into Chinese- 'Jonah Wizard Makes Your Ancestors Fat'.”
― Gordon Korman, quote from The Emperor's Code


“In our family, you don't get a childhood. We're too busy trying to dominate the world.”
― Gordon Korman, quote from The Emperor's Code


“Why can't you just lie and cheat like the others?" Dan snapped. "Can't you just see that's better than being nice one minute and then turning around and selling us out? It may be very Cahill, but it stinks! Grace had a saying: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, I'll conk you with this pet carrier!”
― Gordon Korman, quote from The Emperor's Code


“You don't get Billie Joe Armstrong's autograph on your forehead without following your instincts.”
― Gordon Korman, quote from The Emperor's Code


“The Bombyx mori caterpillar," her brother supplied, thinking of snack time at the Shaolin Temple. "It tastes like chicken.”
― Gordon Korman, quote from The Emperor's Code



“During construction, when a worker died, his body was built right into the Wall itself. No one knew how many corpses lay within the stone and mortar, but some estimates ran as high as three million souls.”
― Gordon Korman, quote from The Emperor's Code


“It’s like living your whole life without ever looking in a mirror, Amy thought, and suddenly you see your reflection, and you’re a monster.”
― Gordon Korman, quote from The Emperor's Code


“fact, it’s just crazy enough to be the kind of thing that actually happens in your family. A regular hiding place isn’t good enough for you Froot Loops; you have to use Mount Everest!”
― Gordon Korman, quote from The Emperor's Code


About the author

Gordon Korman
Born place: in Montreal, Canada
Born date October 23, 1963
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“War thoughts again. I think back to the business cards from that health shop earlier on. I think about miniature wars that individuals fight all the time. They fight against cellulite, or negative emotions, or addictions, or stress. I think about how we can now hire all different sorts of mercenaries to help us fight against ourselves…Therapists, manicurists, hairdressers, personal trainers, life coaches. But what’s it all for? What do all these little wars achieve? Although it is a part of my life too, and I want to be thin and pretty and not laughed at in the street and not so stressed and mad that I start screaming on the tube, it suddenly seems a little bit ridiculous. All the time we do these things we are trying to enlist ourselves into a bigger war. We are trying to join up, constantly, with the enemy.
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Hitler tried to impose his shiny, blonde, neat, sparkling world on us all and we resisted. So how is it that when McDonald’s and Disney and The Gap and L’Oreal and all the others try to do the same thing we all just say, ‘OK’? Hitler needed marketing, that’s all. His propaganda was, of course, brilliant for its time, everyone knows that. What a great idea, to make people feel that they belong to something, that their identity makes them special. If Hilter had bee able to enlist a twenty-first-century marketing department, would he have been able to sell Nazism to everyone? Why not? You can just see a beautiful, thin woman with her long blonde hair moving softly in the breezes, and the tagline ‘Because I’m worth it’.”
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