Uglies (Uglies, #1)

by Scott Westerfeld

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.

If only people were smarter, evolved enough to treat everyone the same even if they looked different.

She read it, looking for clues. Take the coaster straight past the gap, until you find one that’s long and flat. Cold is the sea and watch for breaks. At the second make the worst mistake. Four days later take the side you despise, and look in the flowers for fire-bug eyes. Once they’re found, enjoy the flight. Then wait on the bald head until it’s light.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

The flowers were so beautiful, so delicate and unthreatening, but they choked everything around them.

“They aren’t freaks,” Shay said. “The weird thing is, these are famous people.” “Famous for what? Being hideous?” “No. They’re sports stars, actors, artists. The men with stringy hair are musicians, I think. The really ugly ones are politicians, and someone told me the fatties are mostly comedians.”

Nature, at least, didn’t need an operation to be beautiful. It just was.

the words he was saying, had somehow turned David into a pretty. Just for a moment.

Tally wondered which had come first: the operation or the lesions? Was becoming pretty just the bait to get everyone under the knife? Or were the lesions merely a finishing touch on being pretty? Perhaps the logical conclusion of everyone looking the same was everyone thinking the same.

“It’s funny. At school, they never talk much about how it happened—the last panic, when the Rusty world fell apart. They shrug and say that all their mistakes just kept adding up, until it all collapsed like a house of cards.”