"My mother wasn't a fool," I say. "She just understood something you didn't. That it's not sacrifice it it's someone else's life you're giving away, it's just evil." I take another step and say, "She taught me all about real sacrifice. That it should be done from love, not misplaced disgust for another person's genetics. That it should be done from necessity, not without exhausting all other options. That it should be one for people who need your strength because they don't have enough of their own."

"Can I be forgiven for all I've done to get here? I want to be. I can. I believe it."

"I keep finding myself stifled by the company of others and then crippled by loneliness when I leave them. I am terrified and I don't even know of what, because I have lost everything already."

"It's strange how time can make a place shrink, make its strangeness ordinary."

"Why do you care? I ask myself. He betrayed you. He didn't try to stop your execution. I don't care. I do care. I don't know."

"I thought that when I received Christina's forgiveness, the hard part of Will's death would be over. But when you kill someone you love, the hard part is never over. It just gets easier to distract yourself from what you've done."

"People talk about the pain of grief, but I don't know what they mean. To me, grief is a devastating numbness, every sensation dulled."

"This isn't about what would they would want, Tris."

""Can we do it please? I would like to avoid having to break you out of prison," I say. Suddenly desperate for comfort, I reach for Tris's hand, and she brings her fingers up to meet mine. We are not people who touch each other carelessly; every point of contact between us feels important, a rush of energy and relief."

"There are so many ways to be brave in this world. Sometimes bravery involves laying down your life for something bigger than yourself, or for someone else. Sometimes it involves giving up everything you have ever known, or everyone you have ever loved, for the sake of something greater. But sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it is nothing more than gritting your teeth through pain, and the work of every day, the slow walk toward a better life. That is the sort of bravery I must have now."

"I know what my mother is—she is someone for whom the end of a thing justifies the means of getting there, the same as my father, and the same, sometimes, as me."

"Yeah, sometimes life really sucks," she says. "But you know what I'm holding on for?" I raise my eyebrows. She raises hers too, mimicking me. "The moments that don't suck," she says. "The trick is to notice them when they come around."

"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."

"If this is the last message I send you… well, let's just say I hope you burn for this."

"Tris is not your usual Mary Sue. She’s selfish. She’s manipulative. She’s vindictive as hell – and I LOVED that about this book."

"Intelligence is a gift, not a right. It must be wielded not as a weapon but as a tool for the betterment of others."

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

"“Divergent” clearly has thrills, but it also movingly explores a more common adolescent anxiety — the painful realization that coming into one’s own sometimes means leaving family behind, both ideologically and physically."

"Somewhere inside me is a merciful, forgiving person. Somewhere there is a girl who tries to understand what people are going through, who accepts that people do evil things and that desperation leads them to darker places than they ever imagined, I swear she exists, and she hurts for the repentant boy I see in front of me."

"Fear doesn't shut you down; it wakes you up."

"His straight eyebrows are drawn low over his eyes. My stomach writhes, partly because I know he makes a good point but I don't want to admit it, and partly because I want something I don't know how to express; I want to press against the space between us until it disappears. I nod. "But please, when you see an opportunity…" He presses his hand to my cheek, cold and strong, and tilts my head up so I have to look at him. His eyes glint. They look almost predatory. "Ruin them." I laugh shakily. "You're a little scary, Four." "Do me a favor," he says, "and don't call me that." "What should I call you, then?" "Nothing." He takes his hand from my face. "Yet.""

"I think it's important to protect people. To stand up for people. Like you did for me."

"I don't reward preying on the weak. That is cowardice."

"Every time I think about the word "Divergent", I hear Tori's warning—and now my mother's warning too. Don't tell anyone. Dangerous."

"I will be my undoing If I become my obsession."

"Faction customs dictate even idle behavior and supersede individual preference. I doubt all the Erudite want to study all the time, or that every Candor enjoys a lively debate, but they can't defy the norms of their factions any more than I can."

"My heart beats so hard it hurts, and I can't scream and I can't breathe, but I also feel everything, every vein and every fiber, every bone and every nerve, all awake and buzzing in my body as if charged with electricity. I am pure adrenaline."

"Dishonesty is a veil that shields one person from another."

"The Dauntless-born initiates are like a pack of dogs. If I act the wrong way, they won't let me run with them."

"The uniform pounding of feet in my ears and the homogeneity of the people around me makes me believe that I could choose this. I could be subsumed into Abnegation's hive mind, projecting always outward."

"I used to think the Dauntless were fearless. That is how they seemed, anyway. But maybe what I saw as fearless was actually fear under control."

"I sniff, wipe my face one more time, and smooth down my hair. "Do I look like I've been crying?" I say. "Hmm." He leans in close, narrowing his eyes like he's inspecting my face. A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. Even closer, so we would be breathing the same air—if I could remember how to breathe. "No, Tris," he says. A more serious look replaces his smile as he adds, "You look tough as nails.""

"We shall come back, no doubt, to walk down the Row and watch young people on the tennis courts by the clump of mimosas and walk down the beach by the bay, where the driving floats lift gently in the sun, and on out to the pine grove, where the needles thick on the ground will deaden the football so that we shall move among trees as soundlessly as smoke. But that will be a long time from now, and soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time."

"Oh, I know he made mistakes," she said, and lifted up her chin as though facing something, "bad mistakes. Maybe he did bad things, like they say. But inside—in here, deep down—" and she laid her hand to her bosom—"he was a great man."

"I must believe that Willie Stark was a great man. What happened to his greatness is not the question. Perhaps he spilled it on the ground the way you spill a liquid when the bottle breaks. Perhaps he piled up his greatness and burnt it in one great blaze in the dark like a bonfire and then there wasn't anything but dark and the embers winking. Perhaps he could not tell his greatness from ungreatness and so mixed them together so that what was adulterated was lost. But he had it. I must believe that."

"Nothing fazed him, not insult or anger or violence or getting his face beat into a hamburger. He was a true businessman. He knew the value of everything."

"It might have been all different, Jack."

"But if anything is for certain it is that no story is ever over, for the story which we think is over is only a chapter in a story which will not be over[.]"

"[A]ll life is but the dark heave of blood and the twitch of the nerve."

"You live with words a long time. Then all at once you are old, and there are the things and the words don't matter"

"Well, I'm telling you something. You are the stinkingest louse God ever let live." I relished the moment of profound silence which followed, then plunged on, "And you think you can buy me in. Well, I know why you want to. You don't know how much I know or what. I was thick with the Boss and I know a lot. I'm the joker in the deck. My name is Jack and I'm the wild jack and I'm not one-eyed. You want to deal me to yourself from the bottom of the deck. But it's no sale, Tiny, it's no sale."

"[F]or when you get in love you are made all over again."

"The person that loves you has picked you out of the great mass of uncreated clay which is humanity to make something out of, and the poor lumpish clay which is you wants to find out what it has been made into. But at the same time, you, in the act of loving somebody, become real, cease to be a part of the continuum of the uncreated clay and get the breath of life in you and rise up. So you create yourself by creating another person, who, however, has also created you, picked up the you-chunk of clay out of the mass. So there are two you's, the one you yourself create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those two you's are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on its axis. But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldn't be any difference between the two you's or any distance between them. They would coincide perfectly, there would be a perfect focus, as when a stereoscope gets the twin images on the card into perfect alignment."

"The subject of my future, as a matter of fact, was one on which I had never cared to dwell. I simply didn't care. I would think that I'd get a job, any kind of job, and do it and collect my pay and spend the pay and go back to the job on Monday morning, and that would be all. I had no ambitions."

"For West is where we all plan to go someday. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go."

"A time comes when you think you cannot bear another thing, but it happens to you, and you can bear it."

"[I]f you could not accept the past and its burden, there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and […] if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future."

"[W]hatever you live is Life."

"[T]he human being is a very complicated contraption and […] they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of bad and the bad out of good[.]"

"[Y]ou have to make the good out of the bad because that is all you have to make it out of."