“Nature is neutral. Nature doesn’t care how much money a person makes.”

He stares at me, and I don’t look away. He isn’t a dog, but the same rules apply. Looking away is submissive.

Sometimes, the best way to help someone is just to be near them.

Since I was young, I have always known this: Life damages us, every one. We can’t escape that damage. But now, I am also learning this: We can be mended. We mend each other.

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.

Can we just call them storm spirits?” Leo asked. “Venti makes them sound like evil espresso drinks.

I wanted to be a cartoonist when I was young.

You don’t have to be unscientific to make beautiful art or to write beautiful things…

Love is the effort and desire to make someone else everything they were created to be.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

You can feel when something’s authentic, and you can feel when it’s not: you know when someone’s trying to make the club record, or trying to make the girl record, or trying to make the thug record. It’s none of that. It’s just my emotions.

Each and every one of us is capable of making such a contribution.

The riches of the rich are not the cause of the poverty of anybody; the process that makes some people rich is, on the contrary, the corollary of the process that improves many peoples want satisfaction.