“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.

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 see a green tree. And to me it is green. And you would call the tree green also. And we would agree on this. But is the colour you see as green the same colour I see as green?

No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.

There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.

The parenting style that is good for grit is also the parenting style good for most other things: Be really, really demanding, and be very, very supportive.

With ‘Lady Macbeth,’ I had two other things offered to me, and they would have also been very fun, but you just have to figure that out. And then you do it.

I feel strongly, because a man who will himself die one day in the not to distant future and, also, as a psychiatrist who spent decades dealing with death anxiety, that confronting death allows us, not to open some noisome.

For many, Christmas is also a time for coming together. But for others, service will come first.

I’m Japanese, and I’m also white American, and neither camp wants me in their camp.