“You believe you know them, that you understand them, but their motives are always hidden from you, buried in their own hearts. You will never know them, but sometimes you decide to trust them.”

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.

I didn’t know that idiocy caused people to just start spontaneously bleeding from the nose.

In ‘Insurgent’ we realise how large the world really is

Sometimes it involves giving up everything you have ever known, or everyone you have ever loved for the sake of something greater.

His fingers slide into my hair, and I hold on to his arms to stay steady as we press together like two blades at a stalemate.

They dispute not in order to find or even to seek Truth, but for victory, and to appear the more learned and strenuous upholders of a contrary opinion. Such persons should be avoided by all who have not a good breastplate of patience.

Always give a word or sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, or even a stranger, if in a lonely place.

I don’t think you could ever know just how truly special you are that even on the darkest nights you are my brightest star

She does not want to feel even the faintest temptation to call his mobile number, as she had done obsessively for the first year after his death so she could hear his voice on the answering service.

There’s no secret about success. Did you ever know a successful man who didn’t tell you about it?

Oh, that dog! Ever hear of a German Shepherd that bites its nails? Barks with a lisp? You say, “Attack!” And he has one. All he does is piddle. He’s nothing but a fur-covered kidney that barks.

We were by nature children of wrath, even as others.

When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching. I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools.