Quote collection
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"He holds my face in both hands and kisses me back. I press into the distance between us until it is gone, crushing the secrets we have kept and the suspicions we have harbored-for good, I hope."
"It's wrong," he says. "It doesn't matter if your parents are in a better place, they aren't here with you, and that's wrong, Tris. It shouldn't have happened. It shouldn't have happened to you. And anyone who tells you it's okay is a liar."
"I laugh, mirthless, a mad laugh. I savor the scowl on her face, the hate in her eyes. She was like a machine; she was cold and emotionless, bound by logic alone. And I broke her."
"I can't force you. I can't make you want to survive this." He pulls me against him and runs his hand over my hair, tucking it behind my ear. His fingers trail down my neck and over my shoulder, and he says, "But you will do it. It doesn't matter if you believe you can or not. You will, because that's who you are."
"I wake wondering how I did not notice, every day I sat across from her at the breakfast table, that she was full to bursting with Dauntless energy. Was it because she hid it well? Or was it because I wasn't looking?"
"I came here so that no one else would die. I came here to protect as many people as I could. And I care more about Tobias's safety than anyone else's. So why am I here, if he's here? What's the point?"
"Caleb and Tris exchange a look. The skin on his face and on her knuckles is nearly the same colour, purple-blue-green, as if drawn with ink. This is what happens when siblings collide - they injure each other in the same way."
"I look up, and stop breathing. Eyes glitter in the darkness. Dark shapes sit in the car, more numerous than we are. The factionless."
"I didn't realize until that moment that Dauntless initiation had taught me an important lesson: how to keep going."
"It is amazing how pretending to be in a different faction changes everything -- even the way I walk. That must be why it's so strange that I could easily belong in three of them."
"A sob racks my body again, and he wraps his arms around me so tightly I find it difficult to breathe, but it doesn't matter. My dignified weeping gives way to full-on ugliness, my mouth open and my face contorted and sounds like a dying animal coming from my throat. If this continues I will break apart, and maybe that would be better, maybe it would be better to shatter and bear nothing."
"You may have succeeded in shutting down the attack simulation, girl, but it was by luck alone, not skill. I would die of shock if you managed to do anything useful again for a long time" This is the Marcus that Tobias knows. The one who knows right where to hit to cause the most damage."
"This is bizarre," I say. "I think it's beautiful," he says. I give him a look. "What?" He laughs a little. "They each have an equal role in government; they each feel equally responsible. And it makes them care; it makes them kind. I think that's beautiful."
"I never used to understand why people bothered to hold hands as they walked, but then he runs one of his fingertips down my palm, and I shiver and understand it completely"
"But Christina and I are not people who cry together; we're people who fight together. SO I hold my tears in."
"I did not know that my entire personality, my entire being, could be discarded as the byproduct of my anatomy. What if I really am just someone with a large prefrontal cortex...and nothing more?"
"Before we sit down, he puts his mouth next to my ear and says, “I like your hair that way."
"Soon I will honor my parents by dying as they died. and if all they believed about death was true, soon I will join them in whatever comes next."
"Guilt [is] a tool, rather than a weapon against the self."
"I think that you are the liar!" I say, my voice quaking. "You tell me you love me, you trust me, you think I'm more perceptive than the average person. And the first second that belief in my perceptiveness, that trust, that love is put to the test, it falls apart." I am crying now, but I am not ashamed of the tears shining on my cheeks or the thickness of my voice. "So you must have lied when you told me all those things... you must have, because I can't believe your love is really that feeble."