Veronica Roth Quotes

Clearly, I'm drawn to characters with inner conflicts.

I'm not the kind of person that would step on people just to get where I wanted to be, but I have crossed moral boundaries when I've either been afraid or desperate.

I am not self-destructive. I am not a person who wants to die.

I know who Jack Whittaker is. And some days I don't like who I am.

There is in every one of us an unending see-saw between the will to live and the will to die.

When your own life is threatened, your sense of empathy is blunted by a terrible, selfish hunger for survival.

I often wish for the end of the wretched remnant of my life; and that wish is a rational one; but then the innate principle of self-preservation, wisely implanted in our natures, for obvious purposes, opposes that wish, and makes us endeavour to spin out our thread as long as we can, however decayed and rotten it may be.

I am doing the right thing, he told himself, so why do I feel so bad?

Were Guilt is, Rage and Courage doth abound.

I know I've done the right thing but I couldn't feel worse about it, and I suppose that is part of what it is to lead.

If I had any decency, I'd be dead. Most of my friends are.

I am sorry," was all Drizzt could quietly mouth. Vierna shook her head, refusing any apology. To Drizzt, it seemed as if that buried part of her that was Zaknafein Do'Urden's daughter approved of this ending.

I knew it wasn't fair, I knew it was wrong, but I couldn't help it. And after a while, the anger I felt just sort of became part of me, like it was the only way I knew how to handle the grief. I didn't like who I'd become, but I was stuck in this horrible cycle of questions and blame.

I felt, and often still feel, unable to live up to the ideals I really hold.

Basically, that's why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself.

Only in a true life or death scenario can you have mental clearness to know that you cannot feel guilty for surviving.

I wish they were all dead and we were, too. It would be best." Well, there's no good response to that. I can hardly dispute it since I was walking around with a syringe to kill Peeta when I found them. Do I really want him dead? What I want...what I want is to have him back.

If you allowed yourself to hear or feel amusement, you would hear and feel pain.

If you can't save your own life, is it even worth saving?

The ways I could hurt her and hurt myself. Those two things were intertwined somehow. It's hard to explain, but when you were as closed off as I was the past few months, opening felt as wrong as stripping naked in church.

I didn’t know how I could live with that knowledge, without it eating me up, without it poisoning every happy memory I had of growing up. Without it ruining everything Beck and I had. I didn’t understand how someone could be both God and the devil. How the same person could destroy you and save you. When everything I was, good and bad, was knotted with threads of his making, how was I supposed to know whether to love or hate him?

It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body... On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.

Of course he was a part of what I hated about myself. Everything was a part of what I hated about myself. It wasn't really personal.

I have been a hundred times on the point of killing myself, but still was fond of life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our worst instincts. What can be more absurd than choosing to carry a burden that one really wants to throw to the ground? To detest, and yet to strive to preserve our existence? To caress the serpent that devours us, and hug him close to our bosoms till he has gnawed into our hearts?

Love has this in common with scruples, that it becomes embittered by the reflections and the thoughts that beset us to free ourselves.