The Darkest Minds Quotes

People don't live like islands. ~ Alexandra Bracken

You really didn't have White Noise? Calm Control?" I demanded, surprised by the anger licking
at my heart. What camp had these kids been in? Candy Land? ~ Alexandra Bracken

I hesitate, hand on my seatbelt buckle. I know I need to get going somewhere, but - well, what's the harm in scoping the area out? Making sure it's as safe as Remy seems to think it is?
"All right, Remy," I say, opening the door.
"Remy," he shoots back. "Jesus, you can't even remember my name? The sewers weren't kind to you, were they?"
"Wait - what?" I ask, shutting the door, locking it. No one's taking my Lucy.
He just looks exasperated, which just makes me confused.
"You called me Ruby," Remy said, indignantly.
I stare at him. There's a flutter of something wild, panicked in my chest I don't understand and I don't particularly want to examine. I'm tired and when I'm tired my tongue gets lazy. "Sorry. Tired. Idiot. ~ Alexandra Bracken

The scars of what had happened were still there, not glued together to try to minimise the appearance of them, but glowing with thin rivulets of gold - more beautiful for having once been broken. ~ Alexandra Bracken

Black ia the color that is no color at all.
Black is the color of a child's still, empty bedroom. The heaviest hour of night - the one that traps you in your bunk, suffocating in another nightmare. It is a uniform stretched over the broad shoulders of an angry young man. Black is the mud, the lidless eye watching your every breath, the low vibrations of the fence that stretches up to tear at the sky. ~ Alexandra Bracken

Nope," he whispered, when I tried to tug it away. "Mine now. ~ Alexandra Bracken

She shows up everywhere, at any time, like she can guess
what we're going to do before we do it."
"The lady is good at what she does," Liam confirmed.
"Can you please not compliment the person trying to drag our asses back to camp? ~ Alexandra Bracken

Oh my God, Green," I heard Chubs say from somewhere in the room. "Just take the damn socks
and put the kid out of his misery. ~ Alexandra Bracken

A moment later, Liam's bright blue eyes opened, and he was seeing me. He just wasn't seeing Ruby. ~ Alexandra Bracken

The kids in the League knew about the camps-vaguely. There were only a few of us who had actually lived in one and experienced the life firsthand, but there was an unspoken rule we didn't talk about it. Everyone knew the truth, but the truth didn't live inside them the same way it did for us. They'd heard about the sorting machines, the cabins, the testing, but most of their stories were gossip, completely wrong. These kids had never stood for hours on end in an assembly lime. They didn't know fear came in the shape of a small black camera lens, an eye that followed you everywhere at all times. ~ Alexandra Bracken

The Darkest Minds tend to hide behind the most unlikely faces. ~ Alexandra Bracken

Just shut up and start sucking each other's faces already," Vida grumbled, leaning awkwardly against the stump. She would never admit it aloud, but I knew the burns on her back her eating her alive with pain. "I'm trying to make up for the sleep I lost when you started screeching at each other like cats in heat."
"Miss Vida," Liam said, "has anyone ever told you that you are positively the whipped cream on the sundae of life?"
She glared at him. "Anyone ever told you your head is shaped like a pencil?"
"That is physically impossible," Chubs groused. "He'd be--"
"Actually," Liam began, "Cole once did try to-- What?"
"Oh, I'm sorry," Chub said, "apparently the middle of my sentence interrupted the beginning of yours. Do continue."
"I'm going to guess you probably don't want to hear about the time he pushed my head through the neighbours fence..."
"Was there a lot of blood?" Vida asked, suddenly interested. "Did you lose an ear?"
Liam held his hands up next to his ears, indicating both were firmly attached to his skull.
"Then, no" she said. "No one wants to hear your boring-ass story. ~ Alexandra Bracken

Ruby, give me one reason why we can't be together, and I'll give you a hundred why we can. We can go anywhere you want. I'm not your parents. I'm not going to abandon you or send you away, not ever. ~ Alexandra Bracken

Even the darkest minds can be overcome with compassion ~ C.E. Dimond

We used our minds like weapons clenched tightly in our fists, struggling to return them back to their holsters without injuring ourselves in the process. ~ Alexandra Bracken

The thing that scares me is that some part of me understands where they're coming from. They took everything from us, you know? Why shouldn't we be able to take it back if we have the power to? ~ Alexandra Bracken

- I don't want to lose you
- Then why are you the one that keeps letting go? ~ Alexandra Bracken

When I caught up to him again, my fingers closed around the soft, loose leather of his jacket's sleeve. At the
slightest tug, Liam turned, his blue eyes lit up in surprise. I took a step back and pulled my hand back to my side,
shocked at myself. It had felt natural to do it - I hadn't been thinking at all, only feeling a very sharp, real need
to be close to him. ~ Alexandra Bracken

Let me tell you what I think about your fucking rules," he said, his voice dripping with venom as he pushed past Liam. "You sit up in your room and you pretend like you want what's best for everyone, but you don't do any of the work yourself. I can't tell if you're just a spoiled little shit, or if you're too worried about getting your pretty princess hands dirty, but it sucks. You are fucking awful, and you sure as hell don't have me fooled ... You talk about us all being equals, like we're one big rainbow of peace and all that bullshit, but you never once believed that yourself, did you? You won't let anyone contact their parents, and you don't care about the kids that are still trapped in camps your father set up. You wouldn't even listen when the Watch kids brought it up. So what I want to know is, why can't we leave? ... What's the point of this place, other than for you to get off on how great you are and toy with people and their feelings? ~ Alexandra Bracken

Breathing him in wasn't enough, I wanted to inhale him. The leather, the smoke, the sweetness. ~ Alexandra Bracken

I did more than just toy with her feelings, didn't I, Stewart? ~ Alexandra Bracken

Jude: But I thought Fancy was the Slip Kid?
Olivia: Fancy?
Ruby: He nicknamed Clancy.
Olivia: Fancy sort of suits him. ~ Alexandra Bracken

Er, um, well. Most of the things coming out of my mouth are sounds, not words. Seems you spend enough time by yourself dumpster diving, you forget basic
human social skills ~ Alexandra Bracken

That's right, you get him, Mary. Don't let him change the subject! ~ Alexandra Bracken

Cellophane flowers of yellow and green ...
And I can't even help myself, I start laughing - I'm laughing and laughing and
laughing like an absolute crazy person, until the tears track down my face, because it has
to be a sign. I can't believe it's anything less. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Of course.
Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes
And she's gone
The words echo in my mind, making it ache all over again. She's gone.
Don't go, don't go, don't go - I hate those words, I hate the magnetic pull of whatever it is I've forgotten, the regret waiting to make itself known. ~ Alexandra Bracken

Are you driving this slow because you have no idea where we're going, or because you're hoping we jump out of the car & put ourselves out of our misery? ~ Alexandra Bracken

Can't seem to stop looking for their reflections behind mine in each window or glossy surface I pass. ~ Alexandra Bracken

Let's carpe the hell out of this diem. ~ Alexandra Bracken

Let's see if I remember all of this - born in Charlottesville, Virginia, but raised in Salem by her mother, Susan, a teacher, and her father, Jacob, a police officer. Attended Salem Elementary School until your tenth birthday, when your father called into his station to report an unknown child in his house - "
"Stop," I muttered. Liam looked over his shoulder, trying to divide his attention between me and the boy reciting the sordid tale of my life. " - but, bad luck, the PSFs beat the police to your house. Good luck, someone dropped the ball or they had other kiddies to pick up, because they didn't wait around long enough to question your parents, and thus, didn't pre-sort you. And then you came to Thurmond, and you managed to avoid their detecting you were Orange - " "Stop!" I didn't want to hear this - I didn't want anyone to hear it. ~ Alexandra Bracken

I thought I had escaped the monsters, that I'd left them locked up behind an electric fence. But the shadows were alive, and they had chased me here. ~ Alexandra Bracken

I started at the beginning, the escape. Fleeing through the forest, meeting a new danger at every turn, the desperation that came with trying to protect everyone when you could barely take care of yourself. The boy with the bottomless dark eyes, the betrayal, the fire, the smoke. And by the time I realized I had told him my own story, Jude was fast asleep, tucked firmly into dreams. ~ Alexandra Bracken

Joseph Lister?" Liam said suddenly, cutting through the silence. "Really? Him?"
Chubs stiffened beside me. "That man was a hero. He pioneered research on the origins of infections and sterilization."
Liam stared hard at the faux leather cover of just Chubs's skip-tracer ID, carefully choosing his next words. "You couldn't have chosen something cooler? Someone who is maybe not an old dead white guy?"
"His work led to the reduction of post operative infections and safer surgical practices," Chubs insisted. "Who would you have picked? Captain America?"
"Steve Rogers is a perfectly legit name." Liam pass the ID back to him. " This is all ... very Boba Fett of you. I'm not sure what to say, Chubsie. ~ Alexandra Bracken

Stay out of this, Green!" He was still wholly focused on Chubs. "What else did you tell her?
What else did she get out of you?"
I jerked back, one single word throwing me off balance.
"What did you just call her?" Chubs interrupted. Of course he had caught it, too.
"What? I'm not allowed to use her name now?" he demanded. The look on his face was ripe
with derision. "What do you want me to call you? What clever codename did the League think up for
you? Pumpkin? Tiger? Tangerine?"
"You called me Green," I said.
"No I didn't," he said. "Why the hell would I call you that? I know what you are."
"You did," Chubs insisted. "You called her Green. You really don't remember? ~ Alexandra Bracken

Light blooms the brighter in the darkest places. ~ Alison Croggon

I went to West Texas and started writing a cycle of Americana poems after the space conjured images that, as a child, I only saw on television-John Wayne, cowboys, borderlines. But suddenly, I felt close to these once-foreign imageries and wondered how I'd changed. Each evening brought the darkest skies in the country, and I understood the expansiveness of our inner selves. Ultimately nothing divides us except the worlds and words we allow. ~ Nathalie Handal

He truly wasn't very funny but:

1. Apart from Kyazike, who is ten times as funny as me, I don't find anyone as funny as me, even in this, the darkest period of my life.

2. Actually, no man is as funny as me or any woman I've ever met. ~ Candice Carty-Williams

Lord Kane," the king acknowledged. "Before the proceedings begin, we must say how thrilled we were to meet your PMS."
Uh ... "My what?" "Your personal male secretary. ~ Gena Showalter

If the pursuit of God's glory is not ordered above the pursuit of man's good in the affections of the heart and the priorities of the Church, man will not be well served, and God will not be duly honored. I am not pleading for a diminishing of missions but for a magnifying of God. When the flame of worship burns with the heat of God's true worth, the light of missions will shine to the darkest peoples on earth. And I long for that day to come! ~ John Piper

Are you mine?" I asked, low knowing the answer already.
"Completely." His voice thrummed with conviction.
And oh, I liked it.
"So I may do anything I wish with you?"
"Anything."
I didn't need his invitation, of course. He belonged to me, like everything in Sheol, but there was more pleasure in a willing slave. I drew my athame and took his hand. He shuddered at my touch because I put a thread of power in it, pulled it through him in a flicker of the darkest pleasure. Soon enough he'd beg for this, unable to perform with anyone else. I knew how to enthrall my lovers. With a faint smile, I pricked the tip of his finger. Not as much pain as he expected, I think, but I drew blood. His gasp aroused me. His blood welled like a crimson jewel and I took his fingertip between my lips, tasting him. Learning his secrets. ~ Ann Aguirre

It was in the darkest of my days when you took my sorrow and you took my pain ~ Brandi Carlile

'Let the Great World Spin' at the end talks a lot about connections and light and possibility and the fact that the world doesn't end. Even in the darkest times, we have to go on. ~ Colum McCann

The unique idea of [The Darkest Time] movie is because in usual if you are in darkness, you are scared. But this movie is the opposite. In darkness, you are okay. ~ Timur Bekmambetov

Dante Alighieri. The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis. ~ Dan Brown

What I know is that fathers who slammed their teenage boys for sass would then release them to streets where their boys employed, and were subject to, the same justice. And I knew mothers who belted their girls, but the belt could not save these girls from drug dealers twice their age. We, the children, employed our darkest humor to cope. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

It's always darkest before you're blinded by the light ~ Josh Stern

Like it or not, i was already learning that in the worst and darkest time, I would find specks of light, moments of joy. What I didn't want to learn was the other, harsher lesson - that in life's brightest moments there would also be unbearable pain. p 87 ~ Melody Beattie

Upon the delicate chin you turned
Venus had set her cloven sign.
Like embers seen through darkest wine
Your unextinguished tresses burned. ~ Clark Ashton Smith

Even through the darkest phase
Be it thick or thin
Always someone marches brave
Here beneath my skin ~ K.d. Lang

The people who are there for you on your darkest nights are the ones worth spending your brightest days with! ~ Dr Robertino Bedenian

Afterward, she would finally come to understand what it meant to be human, what it felt like when the wrong man loves a woman, how the touch of a hand on her back--placed at the exact spot where the shoulder blades end and before the spine begins--can feel like the way that wings beat in the darkest part of the night. ~ Shilo Niziolek

He [The Improved Man] will enjoy not only the sunshine of life, but will bear with fortitude the darkest days. He will have no fear of death. About the grave, there will be no terrors, and his life will end as serenely as the sun rises. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

'The Waking Dark' is about what happens when something awakens a town's darkest impulses and unleashes them on the world. ~ Robin Wasserman

Author's Prayer
If I speak for the dead, I must
leave this animal of my body,
I must write the same poem over and over
for the empty page is a white flag of their surrender.
If I speak of them, I must walk
on the edge of myself, I must live as a blind man
who runs through the rooms without
touching the furniture.
Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking "What year
is it?"
I can dance in my sleep and laugh
in front of the mirror.
Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,
I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak
of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever I say
is a kind of petition and the darkest days
must I praise. ~ Ilya Kaminsky

It's always darkest before the dawn, Todd."
I look at him, baffled. "No, it ain't! What kinda stupid saying is that? It's always lightest before the dawn! ~ Patrick Ness

I peered down the alleyways and into the darkest corners. That Donovan song, 'Try and Catch the Wind', kept playing over-and-over in my head. The odor of dried fish filled the air. I breathed in deeply and smiled. I felt that God, evil, and even death were all very near, but I wasn't afraid. I didn't want to miss a single moment. ~ Richard Cezar

One of the most basic factors in sports is that winning becomes a habit, and losing is the same way. When failure starts to feel normal in your life or your work or even your darkest vices, you won't have to go looking for trouble, because trouble will find you. Count on it. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

For in those times when our hearts are in the darkest shadows, the slightest rays of hope can gleam like eternal sunshine ~ A.W.Chrystalis

The beer aisle would have made Carrie Nation weep. Sven had already warned me that Oregon leads the country in breweries, all of them trying to outdo each other in crafting the hoppiest pale ales, meatiest stouts, darkest porters, fruitiest wheat beers and snootiest lagers. I was hoping to score a case of Budweiser or Miller Genuine Draft, but I was out of luck; apparently I'd be forced to consume craft beer until I finished my assignment and escaped the rain-drenched state. I grabbed a few six packs of something called Beavertail Pale Ale. At least it came in cans. The cereal ~ David Manuel

But here is proof, if ever we needed it , that wonderful things can grow out of even the darkest of times. ~ Sarah Moore Fitzgerald

A healer is someone who seeks to be the light that she wishes she had in her darkest moments. ~ Vironika Tugaleva

Let us then arise and live - arise even in the darkest moments of spiritual stupidity, when hope itself sees nothing to hope for. Let us go at once to the Life. Let us comfort ourselves in the thought of the Father and the Son. ~ George MacDonald

This is the darkest hour before dawn and we should never underestimate monetary authorities' ability to deal with the adversity. ~ Gideon Gono

I am climbing to the top Of the tallest darkest tree I need to know Where heaven stops What lies Beyond the dream ~ Traci Lords

The darkest clouds precipitate the most rain. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Always seek the light even in the darkest atmospheres… that's how we become victorious. ~ Torron-Lee Dewar

God transformed the darkest day humankind had ever known into a new sunrise, and He can transform our darkest days into new birth as well. ~ Tessa Emily Hall

I woke in bed, sweating and breathing heavily. It was the third time I'd had this nightmare: reliving that horrible feeling of falling, out of control, toward the ground.
I was now on month two of just lying there prone, supposedly recovering. But I wasn't getting any better.
In fact, if anything, my back felt worse.
I couldn't move and was getting angrier and angrier inside. Angry at myself; angry at everything.
I was angry because I was shit-scared.
My plans, my dreams for the future hung in shreds. Nothing was certain any more. I didn't know if I'd be able to stay with the SAS. I didn't even know if I'd recover at all.
Lying unable to move, sweating with frustration, my way of escaping was in my mind.
I still had so much that I dreamt of doing.
I looked around my bedroom, and the old picture I had of Mount Everest seemed to peer down.
Dad's and my crazy dream.
It had become what so many dreams become--just that--nothing more, nothing less.
Covered in dust. Never a reality.
And Everest felt further beyond the realms of possibility than ever.
Weeks later, and still in my brace, I struggled over to the picture and took it down.
People often say to me that I must have been so positive to recover from a broken back, but that would be a lie. It was the darkest, most horrible time I can remember.
I had lost my sparkle and spirit, and that is so much of who I am.
And once you lost that spirit, it is ha ~ Bear Grylls

Man little knows what calamities are beyond his patience to bear till he tries them; as in ascending the heights of ambition, which look bright from below, every step we rise shows us some new and gloomy prospect of hidden disappointment; so in our descent from the summits of pleasure, though the vale of misery below may appear, at first, dark and gloomy, yet the busy mind, still attentive to its own amusement, finds, as we descend, something to flatter and to please. Still as we approach, the darkest objects appear to brighten, and the mortal eye becomes adapted to its gloomy situation. ~ Oliver Goldsmith

She was gravity. She was the light in the darkest of my days, and her smile ignited a flame inside of me that had gone out a long time ago. ~ Teresa Mummert

When darkness comes and eats the light,
bury your fears on sorry night.
Because in the winter's darkest hours,
comes the feasting of the Vours.
You cannot see it, the life they stole.
Your body's there, but not your soul. ~ Simon Holt

I was born in darkest ignorance. My spiritual master taught me the truth of the Universe ~ Aniruddha Bose

They share another long look. This one is reserved for ill-fated observers in the moments before impending, inescapable calamity, whether it be natural disaster or violent failure of humanity; a look of resigned melancholy and awe, unblinking in the face of a revealed, horrific, sacred truth. And they realize again, in this darkest hour of the darkest day, they remain alone, fundamentally alone. ~ Paul Tremblay

I can look back at my darkest periods and realize that these were the times when the Lord was holding me closest. But I couldn't see His face becasue my face was in His breast ... crying. ~ John Michael Talbot

In America, they have specialist mystery book stores with whole sections devoted to cat mysteries, golf mysteries, quilting mysteries. It's a hugely broad genre from the darkest noir to tales of a 19th-century vet who solves crimes, thanks to his talking cat. ~ Mark Billingham

I chose the specialty of surgery because of Matron, that steady presence during my boyhood and adolescence. 'What is the hardest thing you can possibly do?' she said when I went to her for advice on the darkest day of the first half of my life.
I squirmed. How easily Matron probed the gap between ambition and expediency. 'Why must I do what is hardest?'
'Because, Marion, you are an instrument of God. Don't leave the instrument sitting in its case my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for 'Three Blind Mice' when you can play the 'Gloria'?
'But, Matron, I can't dream of playing Bach ... I couldn't read music.
'No, Marion,' she said her gaze soft ... 'No, not Bach's 'Gloria'. Yours! Your 'Gloria' lives within you. The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you. ~ Abraham Verghese

Heydrich's life therefore offers a uniquely privileged, intimate and organic perspective on some of the darkest aspects of Nazi rule, many of which are often artificially divided or treated separately in the highly specialized literature on the Third Reich: the rise of the SS and the emergence of the Nazi police state; the decision-making processes that led to the Holocaust; the interconnections between anti-Jewish and Germanization policies; and the different ways in which German occupation regimes operated across Nazi-controlled Europe. On a more personal level, it illustrates the historical circumstances under which young men from perfectly 'normal' middle-class backgrounds can become political extremists determined to use ultra-violence to implement their dystopian fantasies of radically transforming the world. ~ Robert Gerwarth

They learned each other's darkest secrets, their sensual intimate yearnings shared by only the two of them as they talked about the fetishes ~ Ella Dominguez

A day may come when all hope is lost; when the oceans run red with our blood, and our darkest hour is upon us - and when it comes, that red day of reckoning, we turn, my dears, not to our rulers-in-good-times, but to our leaders-in-bad-times. ~ Louise Blackwick

Even in the darkest times the gods are always there. ~ Tomi Adeyemi

Your darkest moments are not meant to be swept under the carpet, hidden from the world in the silent pursuit of perfection. The darkness you've overcome is your ticket into leadership. It's what you're meant to light up in the world. ~ Vironika Tugaleva

Like the first time we met, in those clear peridot pools of warmth, I see something familiar yet unfamiliar. All the same, I feel as if we've met in a different space and time. Somewhere along the ragged edges of my sweetest dreams and darkest nightmares, I've talked with this boy. He's told me his secrets, and I, mine. ~ Gail McHugh

I think the darkest dark is always attracted to the brightest light. ~ Victor Perera