Allegiant Quotes
"Every question that can be answered must be answered or at least engaged. Illogical thought processes must be challenged when they arise. Wrong answers must be corrected. Correct answers must be affirmed." —From the Erudite faction manifesto
"My ancestor, and this is the inheritance she passed to me: freedom from the factions, and the knowledge that my Divergent identity is more important than I could have known."
"I understand why you worked with Marcus, and why you felt like you couldn’t tell me. But..."
"I feel like myself, strong and weak at once—allowed, at least for a little while, to be both."
"It isn’t usually that easy for me to let go of anger, but the past few weeks have been strange for both of us, and I am happy to release the feelings I have been holding on to, the anger and the fear that he hates me and the guilt from working with his father behind his back."
"Making a big statement about the factions was more important to her than safety or the potential loss of lives. I don’t know why that surprises me."
"I know for sure, then, that I can’t be her ally, and I never could have."
"Sometimes it’s hard for me to tell where strategy ends and sympathy for her begins."
"Stay," she says. She touches the empty chair between us. "Please."
"I feel like I am a son comforting his grieving mother."
"We sit with our shoulders touching, our breaths falling into the same rhythm, and we don’t say a word."
"Sometimes it feels like a good idea to stay here and just... try to clean up this mess before we get ourselves involved in another."
"They just want me to live an honest life, you know? And I can’t do that here. I just know that I can’t."
"It doesn’t matter what’s out there, we have to see it for ourselves."
"Being honest doesn’t mean you say whatever you want, whenever you want. It means that what you choose to say is true."
"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."
"We believe in following the guidance of the city’s founders."
"The air still feels rich in my lungs, though summer is drawing to a close."
"My entire life I’ve daydreamed about killing Marcus."
"They would say it’s selfish to let someone die just because they wronged you. Forgive, forgive, forgive."
"I’m so... angry. I try not to think about him because when I do I just want to..."
"It’s always about what they want. Because he belongs to them more than he belongs to me."
"I had to hurt a lot of people to get through Dauntless initiation, and I’ll do it to you, too, if I have to."
"Now I have met the men and women who operate them, and some of that mystery is gone, but what they mean to me will never be gone—my first act as a Dauntless was to jump on one, and every day afterward they were the source of my freedom."
"Death is so quick, so certain. Where we’re going now, nothing is certain."
"I feel empty, not because of sadness, but because of relief, all the tension flowing out of me."
"I can’t imagine isolating a gene for murder, or cowardice, or dishonesty. Those things seem too nebulous to have a concrete location in a person’s body."
"If they told us what to believe, and we didn’t come to it on our own, is it still true?"
"‘Divergent’ is the name we decided to give to those who have reached the desired level of genetic healing."
"So what you’re saying is that if we’re not Divergent, we’re damaged."
"Genes aren’t everything. People, even genetically damaged people, make choices. That’s what matters."
"That internal war doesn’t seem like a product of genetic damage—it seems completely, purely human."
"We just need your healed genes to remain intact and to be passed on to future generations."
"I’m smart. So you’re saying that because my ancestors were altered to be smart, I, their descendant, can’t be fully compassionate."
"Genetically damaged, yes. However, we were surprised to discover that the behavioral modification component of our city’s experiment was quite effective."
"I think of my father, a born Erudite, not Divergent; a man who could not help but be smart, choosing Abnegation, engaging in a lifelong struggle against his own nature, and ultimately fulfilling it."
"If you see someone in trouble, you should help them. Experiment or not."
"We found out the truth. That’s not valuable to you?"
"If they are persistent enough, even tiny drops of water, over time, can change the rock forever. And it will never change back."
"We put everything we had into it. All of us. Even if we didn’t realize we were doing it."
"They have a good reason for their endeavors."
"The serums help the people in the experiment to keep things under control."
"It arms the cities against their own rebellions, for one thing—erase people’s memories and there’s no need to kill them; they just forget what they were fighting about."
"I wonder if that’s the kind of place this is—where dissent can be expressed in public, in the middle of a normal conversation, instead of in secret spaces, with hushed voices."
"You’d be surprised what you have the stomach for, when you have to."
"Desperation can make a person do surprising things."
"It’s just the way things are, Tobias. It’s just genetic, nothing more."
"That’s a lie. It’s about more than genes, here, and you know it."
"Maybe we’ll make a home somewhere inside ourselves, to carry with us wherever we go."
"I didn’t think about Marcus. I should have," I say. He shrugs. "It’s over now."
"Yes," I say. "Just some memories of the compound so far. But it’s getting interesting."
"Blood before faction—no, love before faction, always."
"Our ability to know about ourselves and the world is what makes us human."
"Knowledge is power. Power to do evil, like Jeanine . . . or power to do good, like what we’re doing. Power itself is not evil. So knowledge itself is not evil."
"It’s easier for them to accept than the truth, which is that they can’t know everything about people and why they act the way they do."
"Everyone has to blame something for the way the world is," I say. "For my father, it was the Erudite."
"Sometimes I feel like there is so much to be afraid of, and sometimes I feel like there is nothing left to fear."
"I was afraid of my considerable capacity to kill."
"Dead?" I say, and the word is just an exhale.
"Here, there’s a chance that if you die, someone will care."
"In the cities, if you get killed, definitely no one will give a damn, not if you’re a GD."
"Manslaughter? It means the crime is deemed an accident."
"Freedom to be seen as a whole man instead of a damaged one."
"People are just divided by different things, fighting different wars."
"What’s the use of the experiments at all, except to convince the right people that the government is doing something to make all our lives better, even though it’s not?"
"Will it make me treat other people better? No. The opposite, maybe."
"You don’t believe things because they make your life better, you believe them because they’re true."
"The genes for blue eyes and brown eyes are different too, but are blue eyes ‘damaged’?"
"It’s like they just arbitrarily decided that one kind of DNA was bad and the other was good."
"These people murdered your parents, and you’re not going to do something about it?"
"No more lies. She promised me, and I promised her."
"If genetically pure people caused war and total devastation in the past at the same magnitude that genetically damaged people supposedly do now, then what’s the basis for thinking that we need to spend so many resources and so much time working to correct genetic damage?"
"I may have done bad things, but I would never deliver you to your own execution."
"Everyone has some evil inside them, and the first step to loving anyone is to recognize the same evil in ourselves, so we’re able to forgive them."
"You demonstrated the quality I most need in my advisers," he says. "Which is the ability to make sacrifices for the greater good."
"If someone offers you an opportunity to get closer to your enemy, you always take it."
"I can’t think of many young people who would have come after me instead of running for cover, or who would have been able to save this compound the way you did."
"All that land is filled with people, every one of them different, and the things they do to each other matter."
"Her talent isn’t for controlling other people’s opinions," I say, "it’s for usually being right about people."
"It’s easier to pretend it’s not happening when I’m not around her. But Cara says it so simply I have to agree with her: yes, something has to be done."
"I thrived in Erudite. So many people devoted to discovery and innovation—it was lovely. But now that I know how large the world is... well. I suppose I have grown too large for my faction, as a consequence."
"Ignore them. They don’t know what it is to make a difficult decision."
"The capacity for serum resistance seems to be higher in some people than others."
"I didn’t mean to yell at her. I didn’t mean to get angry at all."
"You aren’t in their world anymore, you’re in this one."
"I stay with him because I choose to, every day that I wake up."
"We can pretend that we don’t belong there anymore, while we’re living in relative safety in this place, but we do. We always will."
"Why did you think there was so much physical devastation in the factionless sector? There was an uprising, and we had to quell it as cleanly as possible."
"I feel sick with anger. That they want to stop a revolution, not to save lives, but to save their precious experiment, would be enough."
"To them, the people in our city are just containers of genetic material—just GDs, valuable for the corrected genes they pass on, and not for the brains in their heads or the hearts in their chests."
"If we are going to win this fight against genetic damage, we will need to make sacrifices. You understand that, don’t you?"
"Maybe it’s not her genes. Maybe it’s some kind of superhuman stubbornness."
"My feelings toward your girlfriend are mixed, yes, but for the most part, I have a lot of respect for her."
"The difference is what’s right. The people in the city, as a whole, are innocent."
"It targets explicit memories, like your name, where you grew up, your first teacher’s name, and leaves implicit memories—like how to speak or tie your shoes or ride a bicycle—untouched."
"What do you do when your parents are evil? Get a new parent."
"We don’t need to be patted or consoled, like a child."
"It happened. It was awful. You aren’t perfect. That’s all there is. Don’t confuse your grief with guilt."
"Admitting involves softening, making excuses for things that cannot be excused; confessing just names the crime at its full severity."
"And after you’ve confessed to Zeke, I think it would help if you leave him alone for as long as he wants to be left alone."