There was a hunger inside me, and there always had been. That hunger was stronger than pain, stronger than horror. It gnawed even after everything else inside me had given up. It was not hope; it did not soar; it slithered, clawed, and dragged, and it would not let me stop.
Like so much of what she said about herself, it was both a joke and not a joke.
It’s hard to know what’s right in this life,′ she said. ‘We do what we can, but what we really need is mercy. Do you know who taught me that?’ A grin. ‘You.
They were not just objects, but escapes when pain made it hard for me to stay in my own body. My comforts in despair.
Men like Ryzek Noavek were not born; they were made. But time could not move backward. Just as he had been made, he had to be unmade.
Space was not a finite container, but that didn’t mean it was empty. Asteroids, stars, planets, the current stream; space debris, ships, fragmented moons, undiscovered worlds; this was a place of endless possibility and unfathomable freedom. It was not nothing, it was everything.
I don’t know why, but his reaction disappoints me.
I would like to experience this ‘date’ phenomenon.
We didn’t always have a planet,” she said. “The currentstream was home, more than a piece of rock. Or our ship. But as a people, we are maybe more closely tied than most to our identity, because we have always had to struggle against disappearing completely. We fight for you, for your belonging, because we fight for our existence. We will surrender the one only when we surrender the other.
I am not a perfect Dauntless member; I am someone who believes that more than one virtue should be prized; I am Divergent.
Find another reason to go on,′ I said. ‘It doesn’t have to be a good one, or a noble one. It just has to be a reason.
I tick off each quality in my mind as he says it – fear, low intelligence, dishonesty, aggression, selfishness. He is talking about the factions. And he’s right to say that every faction loses something when it gains a virtue: the Dauntless, brave but cruel; the Erudite, intelligent but vain; the Amity, peaceful but passive; the Candor, honest but inconsiderate; the Abnegation, selfless but stifling.
I think I just don’t like when I’m not given a choice.
So why is it so difficult for me to forgive myself?
I squeeze Tris’s hand, praying that if I do it hard enough, I will send life back into her body and she will flush with color and wake up. I don’t know how long it takes for me to realize that isn’t going to happen, that she is gone. But when I do I feel all the strength go out of me, and I fall to my knees beside the table and I think I cry, then, or at least I want to, and everything inside me screams for just one more kiss, one more word, one more glance, one more.
She thought of what she had told Hagen earlier, that he had been dying since his wife passed away, and his body hadn’t caught on yet. When she was younger, she had been angry at her dad, thinking she wasn’t enough to keep him around. But now she felt like he had known too well that he was in a piece of weaving that was unraveling, that the world was unmaking itself, and he just didn’t want to witness it.
Power should be given only to those who earn it.
But you should know that about Dauntless- girl, guy, whatever, it doesn’t matter here. What matters is what you’ve got in your gut.
And there were some things I didn’t know I had until I lost them.
I’ll just have to go get her, then.