“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.”

The truth has a way of changing people’s plans.

Grief is not as heavy as guilt, but it takes more away from you.

I gasp, pressing both palms to my chest. Now the monstrous thing has its claws around my throat, squeezing my airway. I twist and put my head between my knees, breathing until the strangled feeling leaves me.

That’s what love does. When it’s right, it makes you more than you were, more than you thought you could be.

We are not people who touch each other carelessly; every point of contact between us feels important, a rush of energy and relief.

“Oh, you know,” I say. “Sun shining. Birds chirping.” She raises an eyebrow at me, as if reminding me that we are in an underground tunnel.

He is stronger than anyone I know, and warmer than anyone else realizes; he is a secret that I have kept, and will keep for the rest of my life.

Every faction conditions its members to think and act a certain way. And most people do it. For most people, it’s not hard to learn, to find a pattern of thought that works and stay that way. But our minds move in a dozen different directions.

Sometimes drastic change requires drastic measures.

Sometimes crying or laughing are the only options left, and laughing feels better right now.

You don’t believe things because they make your life better, you believe them because they’re true.

I know exactly how we fit together, his arm around my waist, my hands on his chest, the pressure of his lips on mine. We have each other memorized.

Mom used to say that politeness is deception in pretty packaging

It will be difficult to break the habits of thinking Abnegation instilled in me, like tugging a single thread from a complex work of embroidery. But I will find new habits, new thoughts, new rules. I will become something else.

It’s strange how a word, a phrase, a sentence, can feel like a blow to the head.

I feel the monster of grief again, writhing in the empty space where my heart and stomach used to be.

Brave men do not gather by thousands to torture and murder a single individual, so gagged and bound he cannot make even feeble resistance or defense.

One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it’s such a nice change from being young.

The past is never dead, it is not even past.

The truth is few people “think” big and even fewer “play” big. Why? Because “big” often means big responsibilitie s, big hassles and big problems. They look at that “bigness” and shrink. They’re smaller than their problems.

I tend to not want to do that anymore. It’s not even that I don’t like it anymore: it’s that I keep trying to find ways for people to dislike me.

If I ever found a place where I belonged, that in itself would be an identity crisis to me.

After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.

Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.