Tris Prior Quotes

I regret ... " Tobias tilts his head, and sighs. "I regret my choice."
"What Choice?"
"Dauntless," he says. "I was born Abnegation. I was planning on leaving Dauntless, and becoming factionless. But I met her, and ... I felt like maybe I could make something more of my decision."
Her. ~ Veronica Roth

How have I never realized before that for all the strong, kind parts of him, there are also hurting, broken parts? ~ Veronica Roth

So small as to be negligible.
It's strange, but there's something in that thought that makes me feel almost ... free. ~ Veronica Roth

If I don't survive," I say, "tell Tobias I didn't want to leave him. ~ Veronica Roth

One choice can transform you! ~ Veronica Roth

Though I know that he had something to do with the attack simulation, and with all those deaths, I find it difficult to pair those actions with the man I see in front of me. I wonder if this is how it is with all evil men, that to someone, they look just like good men, talk like good men, are just as likeable as good men. ~ Veronica Roth

You know, most boys enjoy being trapped in close quarters with a girl. ~ Veronica Roth

It's what you deserve to hear," I say firmly, my eyes going cloudy with tears. "That you're whole, that you're worth loving, that you're the best person I've ever known. ~ Veronica Roth

But then he stops at the door frame and says, It's 9:24. Telling me the time is a small act of betrayal-and therefore an ordinary act of bravery. It is maybe the first time I've seen Peter be truly Dauntless. ~ Veronica Roth

Tris," Tobias says, crouching next to me. His face is pale, almost yellow.
There is too much I want to say. The first thing that comes out is, "Beatrice."
He laughs weakly.
"Beatrice," he amends, and touches his lips to mine. I curl my fingers into his shirt. ~ Veronica Roth

I imagine the wave of water colliding with the rock and spilling over the tile floor, collecting around my shoes. Doing a little at once can fix something, eventually, but I feel like when you believe that something is truly a problem, you throw everything you have at it, because you just can't help yourself. ~ Veronica Roth

Yeah, well," I say, "I left Abnegation because I wasn't selfless enough, no matter how hard I tried to be."
"That's not entirely true." He smiles at me. "That girl who let someone throw knives at her to spare a friend, who hit my dad with a belt to protect me-that selfless girl, that's not you?" ...
"You've been paying close attention, haven't you?"
"I like to observe people/"
"Maybe you were cut out for Candor, Four, because you're a terrible liar. ~ Veronica Roth

You know, the kind of person who gets this tattoo is probably the kind that should keep it very quiet," she says, looking at me from the corner of her eye. "Or else someone will start thinking they're Divergent. ~ Veronica Roth

Dauntless,' he says. 'I was born for Abnegation. I was planning on leaving Dauntless, and becoming factionless. But then I met her, and ... I felt like maybe I could make something more of my decision.'
Her.
For a moment, it's like I'm looking at a different person, sitting in Tobias's skin, one whose life is not as simple as I thought. He wanted to leave Dauntless, but he stayed because of me. He never told me that. ~ Veronica Roth

I fell in love with him. But I don't just stay with him by default as if there's no one else available to me. I stay with him because I choose to, every day that I wake up, every day that we fight or lie to each other or disappoint each other. I choose him over and over again, and he chooses me. ~ Veronica Roth

Faction before blood, yeah? ~ Veronica Roth

He's one of the last friends I have," she says, her voice breaking. "I don't know if I'll ever be able to look at you the same way again. ~ Veronica Roth

Dead people can be our heroes because they cant disappoint us later; they only improve over time, as we forget more and more about them. ~ Veronica Roth

You think my first instinct is to protect you. Because you're small, or a girl, or a Stiff. But you're wrong."
He leans his face close to mine and wraps his fingers around my chin. His hand smells like metal. When was the last time he held a gun, or a knife? My skin tingles at the point of contact, like he's transmitting electricity through his skin.
"My first instinct is to push you until you break, just to see how hard I have to press." he says, his fingers squeezing at the word break. My body tenses at the edge in his voice, so I am coiled as tight as a spring, and I forget to breathe.
His dark eyes lifting to mine, he adds, "But I resist it."
"Why ... " I swallow hard. "Why is that your first instinct?"
"Fear doesn't shut you down; it wakes you up. I've seen it. It's fascinating." He releases me but doesn't pull away, his hand grazing my jaw, my neck. "Sometimes I just want to see it again. Want to see you awake. ~ Veronica Roth

I think he came to die with me," I say. I clamp my hand over my mouth to stifle a sob. If I can keep breathing, I can stop crying. I didn't need or want him to die with me. I wanted to keep him safe. What an idiot, I think, but my heart isn't in it.
"That's ridiculous," he says. "That doesn't make any sense. He's eighteen; he'll find another girlfriend once you're dead. And he's stupid if he doesn't know that."
Tears run down my cheeks, hot at first and then cold. I close my eyes. "If you think that's what it's about ... " I swallow another sob. " ... you're the stupid one. ~ Veronica Roth

I feel like someone breathed new air into my lungs. I am not Abnegation. I am not Dauntless.
I am Divergent. ~ Veronica Roth

Maybe we're strangers no matter where we go. Or maybe we'll make a home somewhere inside ourselves, to carry with us wherever we go. ~ Veronica Roth

His fingers slide into my hair, and I hold on to his arms to stay steady as we press together like two blades at a stalemate. He is stronger than anyone I know, and warmer than anyone else realizes; he is a secret that I have kept, and will keep for the rest of my life. ~ Veronica Roth

I should have known, then, that he would gladly trade thousands of GD memories-lives-for control of the experiments. That he would trade them without even thinking of alternatives-without feeling that he needed to bother to save them.
They're damaged, after all. ~ Veronica Roth

They'll care for each other, she says. That's what people do. I smile and close my eyes. ~ Veronica Roth

Some of my anger has faded, but it isn't hard to call back. All I have to do is think about how cold the air was and how loud the laughter was. Look at her. She's a child. ~ Veronica Roth

They're damaged, after all. ~ Veronica Roth

I stand there for just a few seconds before people realize that I'm there. Their conversation peters out. I wipe my palms off on the hem of my shirt. Too many eyes, and too much silence.
Evelyn clears her throat. "Everyone, this is Tris Prior. I believe you may have heard a lot about her yesterday."
"And Christina, Uriah, and Lynn," supplies Tobias. I'm grateful for his attempt to divert everyone's attention from me, but it doesn't work.
I stand glued to the door frame for a few seconds, and then one of the factionless men--older, his wrinkled skin patterned with tattoos--speaks up.
"Aren't you supposed to be dead?"
Some of the others laugh, and I try a smile. It emerges crooked and small.
"Supposed to be," I say.
"We don't like to give Jeanine Matthews what she wants, though," Tobias says. ~ Veronica Roth

Oh, so it's not enough that I told you; it has to be in the right setting?" I raise my eyebrows. "Next time should I brew some tea and make sure the lighting is right too? ~ Veronica Roth

I just wanted to thank you' he says, his voice low.
'A group of scientists told you that my genes were damaged, that there was something wrong with me - they showed you the test results that proved it. And even I started to believe it.'
He touches my face, his thumb skimming my cheekbone, and his eyes are on mine, intense and insistent.
'You never believed it,' he says 'Not for a second. You always insisted I was ... I don't know, whole. ~ Veronica Roth

Okay. Then ... I can talk. Ask me something."
"Okay." He laughs shakily in my ear. "Why is your heart racing Tris?"
I cringe and say, "Well, I ... I barely know you. I barely know you and I'm crammed up against you in a box, Four, what do you think?" ...
"Maybe you were cut out for Candor," he says, "because you're a terrible liar. ~ Veronica Roth

One choice can transform you. One choice can destroy you. Once choice will define you. ~ Veronica Roth

I look out the window again, taking slow, deep breaths into a body too tense to move. And as I stare out at the land, I think that this, if nothing else, is compelling evidence for my parents' God, that our world is so massive that it is completely out of our control, that we cannot possibly be as large as we feel. -Tris Prior ~ Veronica Roth

The minutes I had left with him fall away like dead leaves pulled from branches. ~ Veronica Roth

And I am someone who does not let inconsequential boys and near-death experiences stop her. ~ Tris Prior

I glance at Tris. She grins at me, then leans in to whisper something to Christina.
"Are you here to help or what, Stiff?" I say. ~ Veronica Roth

If they told us what to believe, and we didn't come to it on our own, is it still true? ~ Veronica Roth

How resilient was the body, to return to its prior form so quickly! Yet the mind was formed of a less pliable substance. The emptiness in her thoughts would not be so easily filled. Instead there was a hollowness among them-a place she had reserved for future joys which now would never arrive. ~ Galen Beckett

If you know the history of the whole concept of whiteness if you know the history of the whole concept of the white race, where it came from and for what reason you know that it was a trick, and it's worked brilliantly. You see, prior to the mid to late 1600s, in the colonies of what would become the United States, there was no such thing as the white race. Those of us of European descent did not refer to ourselves by that term really ever before then. ~ Tim Wise

Publishing a protocol under the name Atom that tries to capture all of the prior art in this stage and might provide a good basis for winding down the syndication wars. ~ Tim Bray

Aiming to check a new test's difficulty, ask your assistants to solve the test prior to the actual exam. If the results are not satisfactory, reevaluate all ambiguous questions and correct them. ~ Eraldo Banovac

They never taste who always drink: They always talk, who never think. ~ Matthew Prior

Before, prior to. There is no difference between these two except length and a certain affectedness on the part of 'prior to.' To paraphrase Bernstein, if you would use 'posterior to' instead of 'after,' then by all means use 'prior to' instead of 'before. ~ Bill Bryson

The Chinese believe in constant change, but with things always moving back to some prior state. They pay attention to a wide range of events; they search for relationships between things; and they think you can't understand the part without understanding the whole. Westerners live in a simpler, more deterministic world; they focus on salient objects or people instead of the larger picture; and they think they can control events because they know the rules that govern the behavior of objects. ~ Richard E. Nisbett

Prior art is as effective as US soldiers in Iraq: They control the ground they stand on, and nothing more. I used to say Vietnam, but, well, you know ... ~ Richard Stallman

The black hole of the galaxy swallows the boiling energy of human fury. Soon my waning fume will be obscured forevermore, all insignia of my ionized essence tucked into the anonymous pleat of the universe's billowing skirt. Until the coarse earth's rank mustiness calls for me, can I take comfort living purposefully in the rhythms of an ordinarily life? Can I unabashedly absorb the scintillating jewels in the daily milieu? Can I savor an array of pleasantries with my tongue, ears, nose, eyes, lips, and fingertips? Can I take solace in the tenderness of the nights by singing out songs of love and heartache? Can I devote the dazzle of daylight and the vastness of the night's starriness to investigate life, make a concerted effort to reduce imbedded ignorance, and penetrate layers of obdurate obliviousness? Can I conduct a rigorous search for wisdom irrespective of wherever this journey takes me? Can I make use of the burly pack of prior personal experiences to increase self-awareness? Can I aspire to go forward in good spirits and cheerfully accept all challenges as they come? Can I skim along the delicate surface of life with a light heart until greeting an endless sleep with a begrudging grin in the coolness of the ebbing light? ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

How is it ... that the Son and Holy Spirit are not co-unoriginate with the Father, if they are co-eternal with Him? Because they are from Him, though not after Him. 'Being unoriginate' necessarily implies 'being eternal,' but 'being eternal' does not entail 'being unoriginate,' so long as the Father is referred to as origin. So because They have a cause They are not unoriginate ... a cause is not necessarily prior to its effects ... Because time is not involved, They are to that extent unoriginate ... for the sources of time are not subject to time. ~ Gregory Of Nazianzus

And all of this then enables Webb to say that Paul's appeal to the creation of Adam prior to Eve is not proof of a transcultural ethical standard. But if a theological argument has to deny significant portions of Scripture for its support, it should surely be rejected by evangelicals who are subject to the authority of the entire Bible as the Word of God. Webb's three ways of denying the historicity of Adam's creation before Eve in Genesis 2 are three steps on the path toward liberalism. ~ Wayne A. Grudem

We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war. These prior struggles for survival were won when leaders found words at the 11th hour that released a mighty surge of courage, hope and readiness to sacrifice for a protracted and mortal challenge. ~ Al Gore

As the U.S. ambassador to Japan, I see this challenge of our younger generations not knowing each other as well as the prior generations. ~ John Roos

I'm not abnegation, I'm not dauntless, I am Divergent ~ Veronica Roth

rationalist believes in reason as the primary source of knowledge, and he may also believe that man has certain innate ideas that exist in the mind prior to all experience. And the clearer such ideas may be, the more certain it is that they correspond to reality. You ~ Jostein Gaarder

Independent and uninvolved. Must be nice. -Tris ~ Veronica Roth

To put the matter in Aristotelian terminology, visual impressions are prior in the order of being to concepts pertaining to physical color, whereas the latter are prior in the order of knowing to concepts pertaining to visual impressions. ~ Wilfrid Sellars

Self-affirmation cannot be found in love; it is a prior condition of genuine love. ~ Jo Coudert

Spencer Brown puts it) once they are discovered, are seen to be extremely simple and obvious, and make everybody, including their discoverer, appear foolish for not having discovered them before. It is all too often forgotten that the ancient symbol for the prenascence (i.e., prior to emergence state) of the world is a fool, and that foolishness, being a divine state, is not a condition to be either proud or ashamed of. ~ Alan W. Watts

The American boy starts swinging the bat about as soon as he can lift one. ~ Tris Speaker

In so doing, I resisted the descent into what the school counselors called low self-esteem. Self-esteem is the dark, distorted shadow of self-possession. Self-esteem gazes inward and wills the inner eye to like what it sees; self-possession looks inward only long enough to take a measure then looks outward at the world in search of a fitting place - and settles for no less. ~ Karen Swallow Prior

Language can never adequately render the cosmic symbolism of music, because music stands in symbolic relation to the primordial contradiction and primordial pain in the heart of the primal unity, and therefore symbolizes a sphere which is beyond and prior to all phenomena. Rather, all phenomena, compared with it, are merely symbols: hence language, as the organ and symbol of phenomena, can never by any means disclose the innermost heart of music; language, in its attempt to imitate it, can only be in superficial contact with music; while all the eloquence of lyric poetry cannot bring the deepest significance of the latter one step nearer to us. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

In the 1960s Martin Luther King Jr. devised a creative strategy of engagement that has since been adapted to many causes. He fused together the power of love as described in the Sermon on the Mount and Mahatma Gandhi's method of nonviolent resistance. "Prior to reading Gandhi," he said, "I had about concluded that the ethics of Jesus were only effective in individual relationships." Gandhi showed him that a movement on behalf of a moral cause could be expressed in a loving way. "I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom. ~ Philip Yancey

I first got into acting when I was 14, coming back from a junior high school basketball game. My mom picked me up and she had been mentioning, prior to that, this community production of 'Godspell', a couple towns over. I was reluctant, at first, and she bribed me with some great dinner that was in that town, neighboring the theater. ~ Skylar Astin

We must all take care to resist the tendency to focus too much attention on the role that criminals and prior offenders play in gun violence. ~ James Florio

Beatrice. We should think of our family. But. But we must also think of ourselves. ~ Veronica Roth

The texture of experience is prior to everything else. ~ Willem De Kooning

For me, the work begins with a rough cut of the film. I can't do much with the script. I've tried to write music to a script prior to seeing the film, but I've found it turns out to be a waste of time. ~ Cliff Martinez

I know some things
I know that I'm not alone, that I have friends, that I'm in love. I know that I don't want to die, and for me that's something
more than I could have said a few weeks ago. ~ Veronica Roth

We are not people who touch each other carelessly; every point of contact between us feels important, a rush of energy and relief. ~ Veronica Roth

Spinoza was the supreme rationalist. He saw an endless stream of causality in the world. For him there is no such entity as will or will power. Nothing happens capriciously. Everything is caused by something prior, and the more we devote ourselves to the understanding of this causative network, the more free we become." ... "I'm sure he would have said that you are subject to passions that are driven by inadequate ideas rather than by the ideas that flow from a true quest for understanding the nature of reality." ... "He states explicitly that a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a more clear and distinct idea of it
that is, the causative nexus underlying the passion." p.269 ~ Irvin D. Yalom

What good literature can do and does do - far greater than any importation of morality - is touch the human soul. ~ Karen Swallow Prior

My conflicts of conscience are about the only battles I'm fighting these days, and I'm willing to fight until the end. There is something freeing
about this life, about living out of a single backpack and disappearing into the night. About smelling terrible and never remembering people's names. About never having to say you're sorry. We exist outside of society. We stay up late and sleep even later. We
are bandits, pirates, serial killers. The dregs. Someone should lock us up and never let us out again. But instead, they give us their money, they offer us their beds. We are not
going to pay for the beer. We are not going to be back here for a good, long while. We have prior engagements. We have the money in a duffel bag. We have no shame. Fuck guilt. Back to life. ~ Pete Wentz

With four? Doing a little ... Addition? Multiplication? ~ Veronica Roth