I wipe my face with my sleeve, laughing so hard my stomach hurts. If my entire life is like this, loud laughter and bold action and the kind of exhaustion you feel after a hard but satisfying day, I will be content.
I reach out and take his hand. His fingers slide between mine. I can’t breathe.
Oh for god’s sake. I’ll just carry you.
I don’t believe it is more important to move forward than to know the truth.
Sometimes I forget that I can hurt you. That you are capable of being hurt.
I think about pressing myself against him, but I can’t, because all our secrets would keep a space between us.
His hand touches my waist, steadies me. The touch sends a shock through my body, and all my insides burn like his fingers ignited them. I pull close to him, pressing my body against his, and lift my head to kiss him.
If you are really one of us, it won’t matter to you that you might fail. And if it does, you are a coward.
Learning how to think in the midst of fear is a lesson that everyone needs to learn.
Be brave, Beatrice. I love you.
He smiles in my memory. A curled lip. Straight teeth. Light in his eyes. Laughing, teasing, more alive in memory than I m in reality. It was him or me. I chose me. But I feel dead too.
But I will find new habits, new thoughts, new rules. I will become something else.
Maybe it’s a little depressing to think that my vision of a perfect world is actually so messed up, but I think it means that I don’t really understand what ‘perfect’ is.
But Christina and I are not people who cry together; we’re people who fight together. SO I hold my tears in.
Living without virtues is to live divorced from society, separated from the most important thing in life, community.
Our eyes meet. I hear a train horn, so faint it could be wind whistling through an alleyway. But I know it when I hear it. It sounds like the Dauntless, calling me to to them.
I am selfish. I am brave.
And is it selfish of me to crave victory, or is it brave?
What’s worse: to be idle while someone dies, or to be exiled and empty-handed?
Why do people want to pretend that death is sleep? It isn’t. It isn’t.