Pretties (Uglies, #2)

by Scott Westerfeld

Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless. —John Ruskin,

Of course, getting what you wanted never turned out the way you’d thought it would.

and kisses are a better fate than wisdom. —e. e. cummings, “since feeling is first”

Left alone, human beings are a plague. They multiply relentlessly, consuming every resource, destroying everything they touch. Without the operation, human beings always become Rusties.”

The beauty of the world… has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

Everyone in the world was programmed by the place they were born, hemmed in by their beliefs, but you had to at least try to grow your own brain. Otherwise, you might as well be living on a reservation, worshipping a bunch of bogus gods.

Even then, her mind had started to change, realizing that nature didn’t need an operation to make it beautiful, it just was.

Maybe she’d always been bubbly, somewhere inside. It only took loving someone—or being in the wild, or maybe just a plunge into freezing water—to bring it out.