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.