Carve the Mark

by Veronica Roth (New York: HarperCollins 2017)

• The better you know yourself, the less surprised you’ll be by your gift.

• Pity was just disrespect wrapped in kindness.

• My mother had always talked quietly when she was angry.  She said it made people listen.

• Honor has no place in survival.

• All people are violent.  Some resist the impulse, and some don’t.  Better to acknowledge it, to use it as a point of access to the rest of your being, than to lie to yourself about it.

• Some people, when faced with the choice between death and pain, chose death… Religious to the point of self-destruction.

• Take a person’s memories and you take the things that formed them.

• Pain had a way of breaking time down.

• Find another reason to go on.

• Sometimes people just believed what they were told.  It was easier to survive that way.

• To continue to love someone so far beyond help, beyond redemption, was madness.

• Soft hearts make the universe worth living in.

• Desperate people make stupid decisions all the time.

• Power in one place tended to transfer to power elsewhere – power over the right people.

• Fearsomeness gave a person a different kind of power.

• Pretending was survival.

• Better to reopen the wound fast, get it over with… bandage it up again.

• People are harder to sum up when you know them well.

• There was no stitching for the mind’s wounds, real though they were.

• The world did not become something just because you needed it to.

• The problem with being so convinced of your own awfulness – you thought other people were lying when they didn’t agree with you.

• Justice, revenge.  It was too late to figure out the difference.

• The heavy heart knows that justice is done.

• Work is not life and life is not work.