“At home I used to spend calm, pleasant nights with my family.”

I’m sick of doing bad things and liking it and then wondering what’s wrong with me. I want it to be over. I want to start again.

I traded cowardice for cruelty; I traded weakness for ferocity.

I have never been carried around by a large boy, or laughed until my stomach hurt at the dinner table, or listened to the clamor of a hundred people all talking at once. Peace is restrained; this is free.

No matter how long you train someone to be brave, you never know if they are or not until something real happens.

Part of me wonders if this is a suicide mission disguised as a game.

Pride is what killed Al, and it is the flaw in every Dauntless heart. It is in mine.

Ingenuity requires creativity.

Reading is such a huge part of my life.

When you’re a writer, you hear your internal critic, and that’s really hard to get over. And then sometimes you hear critiques from classmates and stuff.

I feel like what I have become is halfway between my mother and my father, violent and impulsive and desperate and afraid. I feel like I have lost control of what I have become.

Being honest doesn’t mean you say whatever you want, wherever you want. It means that what you choose to say is true.

Maybe there’s more we all could have done, but we just have to let the guilt remind us to do better next time.

We believe in ordinary acts of bravery, in the courage that drives one person to stand up for another.

In that moment I know exactly what I want; I want to peel away all the layers of clothing between us, strip away everything that separates us, the past and the present and the future.

One choice can transform you. One choice can destroy you. Once choice will define you.

I’ve done without doing things, like sleeping and eating, but I need to write.

In Bali life is a rhythmic, patterned unreality of pleasant, significant movement, centered in one’s own body to which all emotions long ago withdrew.

Manners, really good ones, make it possible to live with almost anyone, gracefully and pleasantly.

Repentance means a change of mind. Formerly, I thought sin as a pleasant thing, but now I have changed my mind about it. Formerly, I thought the world an attractive place, but now I know better.

Could a man live by it, it were not unpleasant employment to be a poet.

If you go into an underground train in London – probably anywhere, but chiefly in London – there’s that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don’t exchange many pleasantries.

Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.

It’s a pleasant thing to be young, and have ten toes.

There may be good, but there are no pleasant marriages.