"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.""

"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."

"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.""

"It ends with all of us dead, doesn’t it? she asked Little Pete. It ends when evil wins and we all surrender. The sad thing was, they were already lost, all of them."

"Do you really want to kill a little boy? No matter what your so-called God tells you, isn’t it wrong? When your beliefs tell you to murder, doesn’t a voice inside you tell you it is wrong?"

"Right and wrong doesn’t come from God. It’s inside us. And we know it. And even if God appears right in front of us, and tells us to our faces to murder, it’s still wrong."

"God doesn’t ask for human sacrifices, Astrid said. Doesn’t He? Brittney smirked. What am I, Astrid? What are any of us? And what was Jesus? A sacrifice to appease a vengeful God, Astrid. Astrid had nothing to say. She knew all the right answers. But the will was gone. Did she herself even believe in God anymore? Why argue over a phantom? They were two fools arguing over lies."

"Of course he’s evil, Brittney enthused. Of course! Evil, good, there’s no difference, don’t you see that? They’re the same thing. Like me and Drake. Yin and yang, Sam. Two in one, a duality."

"Power would go to whoever won this fight. Still Caine hesitated. A big, warm bed. A beautiful girl to share it with. Food. Water. Everything he needed, just a few miles away on the island. The logical, rational answer was obvious. Which is why the world stays messed up, Caine said under his breath. People aren’t rational."

"You were right, it’s one big open-air asylum. Virtue nodded solemnly and glanced back at the church. Yeah, but there’s a couple of saints mixed in with the crazies."

"No giant two-headed hermaphrodite demon unicorn avatars were allowed. Not on school grounds, anyway."

"These three words were always the last thing an OASIS user saw before leaving the real world and entering the virtual one:"

"Some time later, she leaned over and kissed me. It felt just like all those songs and poems had promised it would. It felt wonderful. Like being struck by lightning."

"For years hunters had speculated that Anorak still roamed the OASIS, now as an autonomous NPC. Halliday’s ghost in the machine."

"You look like a low-level wimpazoid to me, Juan Ramírez. And I think you’re hiding something."

"Regardless, you’re a fellow hunter. And a clever one too, or you wouldn’t be standing here."

"And that was when it hit me. Like an anvil falling out of the sky, directly on my skull."

"For the first time, I knew what is was to be a natural at something. To have a gift."

"After that, going public with a clue became known as “pulling a Pendergast"."

"Dude, you have balls of solid adamantium," Aech said. "Respect."

"And then it finally happened. Right while I was sitting there daydreaming in Latin class."

"Gunters who wanted help joined a clan, and Aech and I both agreed that clans were for suck-asses and poseurs."

"The van was my refuge. My Batcave. My Fortress of Solitude."

"A lot of kids owned their own interplanetary vehicles. School parking lots all over Ludus were filled with UFOs, TIE fighters, old NASA space shuttles, Vipers from Battlestar Galactica, and other spacecraft designs lifted from every sci-fi movie and TV show you can think of."

"At first, these individuals were known simply as "egg hunters," but this was quickly truncated to the nickname "gunters.""

"Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest."

"Being human totally sucks most of the time."

"Videogames are the only thing that make life bearable."

"We don't need a map because where we are going, there is no map"

"The Great Recession was now entering its third decade, and unemployment was still at a record high. Even the fast-food joints in my neighborhood had a two-year waiting list for job applicants."

"The OASIS —it’s the greatest videogame ever created, and it only costs a quarter."

"You’d be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no life whatsoever."

"For me, growing up as a human being on the planet Earth in the twenty-first century was a real kick in the teeth. Existentially speaking."

"He had walked through woods, and sat at night beside a campfire. Although he had through the memories learned about the pain of loss and loneliness, now he gained, too, an understanding of solitude and its joy."

"I liked the feeling of love," [Jonas] confessed. He glanced nervously at the speaker on the wall, reassuring himself that no one was listening. "I wish we still had that," he whispered. "Of course," he added quickly, "I do understand that it wouldn't work very well. And that it's much better to be organized the way we are now. I can see that it was a dangerous way to live."

"Jonas did not want to go back. He did not want the memories, didn't want the honor, didn't want the wisdom, didn't want the pain. He wanted his childhood again, his scraped knees and ball games. He sat in his dwelling alone, watching through the window, seeing children at play, citizens bicycling home from uneventful days at work, ordinary lives free of anguish because he had been selected, as others before him had, to bear their burden. But the choice was not his. He returned each day to the Annex room."

"There are so many good memories, The Giver reminded Jonas."

"..."Still," he said slowly, almost to himself, "I did like the light they made. And the warmth.""

"The agony of the fractured leg began to seem no more than a mild discomfort as The Giver led Jonas firmly, little by little, in the deep and terrible suffering of the past."

"Overwhelmed by pain, he lay there in the fearsome stench for hours, listened to the men and animals die, and learned what warfare meant."

"In one ecstatic memory he had ridden a gleaming brown horse across a field that smelled of damp grass, and had dismounted beside a small stream from which both he and the horse drank cold, clear water. Now he understood about animals; and in the moment that the horse turned from the stream and nudged Jonas's shoulder affectionately with its head, he perceived the bonds between animal and human."

"Now he saw another elephant emerge from the place where it had stood hidden in the trees. Very slowly it walked to the mutilated body and looked down. With its sinuous trunk it struck the huge corpse; then it reached up, broke some leafy branches with a snap, and draped them over the mass of torn thick flesh. Finally it tilted its massive head, raised its trunk, and roared into the empty landscape."

"My Instructors in science and technology have taught us about how the brain works," Jonas told him eagerly. "It's full of electrical impulses. It's like a computer. If you stimulate one part of the brain with an electrode, it-"’ He stopped talking. He could see an odd look on The Giver’s face. "They know nothing."

"Jonas tried to be brave. He remembered that the Chief Elder had said he was brave."

"It's the choosing that's important, isn't it?"

"He was left, upon awakening, with the feeling that he wanted, even somehow needed, to reach the something that waited in the distance. The feeling that it was good. That it was welcoming. That it was significant."

"We gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others."

"Do you love me?"

"If everything's the same, then there aren't any choices! I want to wake up in the morning and decide things!"