Veronica Roth Quotes

The dog [in Pavlov's experiments] does not continue to salivate whenever it hears a bell unless sometimes at least an edible offering accompanies the bell. But there are innumerable instances in human life where a single association, never reinforced, results in the establishment of a life-long dynamic system. An experience associated only once with a bereavement, an accident, or a battle, may become the center of a permanent phobia or complex, not in the least dependent on a recurrence of the original shock.

It's not like it's perfect at all. But it's there. The love, it's there. The respect. The day to day has to bring you ease and comfort and safety. The waking up in the morning and going to bed at night, and everything in between has to bring you that. Or else what is the point?

Even in comedies, you've got to feel safe for things to just happen in a way that is natural and free, and recognizable as human.

I didn't grow up in a traditional family, and I never had a family dinner around the table, so whenever I actually had a dinner 'plan,' it meant a lot to me; it made me feel excited and safe.

Things are never quite as scary when you've got a best friend.

It's weird. You find a safe place in someone who you feel like maybe they can't judge you because they don't know you.

Calvin had long been uneasy in his own person and so lived to put everyone else at ease.

Nearly everyone underestimates how powerful the touch of another person's hand can be. The need to be touched is something so primal, so fundamentally a part of our existence as human beings that its true impact upon us can be difficult to put into words. That power doesn't necessarily have anything to do with sex, either. From the time we are infants, we learn to associate the touch of a human hand with safety, with comfort, with love.

Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.

After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment.

Security isn't securities. It's knowing that someone cares whether you are or cease to be.

Of course there were areas of safety; nothing could get at me if I curled up on my father's lap, holding his ear with one thumb tucked into it... All about him was safe.

What can we do?" Mom asked again. I shrugged. But she kept asking, as if there were something she could do, until I just kind of crawled across the couch into her lap and my dad came over and held my legs really tight and I wrapped my arms all the way around my mom's middle and they held on to me for hours while the tide rolled in.

He gathers me up and I'm weightless before he sets me on the railing. He's the only thing keeping me from falling back, out of the reach of daylight. I'm not afraid of falling. I don't fear the sky beyond the train tracks like I did before. I can go anywhere just so long as it's with him.

You sense that he's dangerous but don't now why - and wonder if it's because he makes you feel safer than you've ever felt.

Where a pack of monkeys had traveled over the road, the smell of them lingered for a long time in the air, a dry and stale, mousy smell.

crawling up into daddy's lap when dad was still DADDY nodding my head against his chest soaking in the comfort of his heart LISTENING to the thump...thump somewhere beneath muscle and breastbone I remember his arms their sublime ENCIRCLING and the shawdow of his voice "I love you, little girl. Put away your bad dreams. Daddy's here" I put them away, Until Daddy became my nightmare that one that came HOME from work everyday and instead of picking me up, chased me far far away

It can be scary to be everywhere else for a long time. I always feel that I'm safe at home, near my family.

Security is a thumb and a blanket. Happiness is a warm puppy.

I’m not up for laughing, but their laughter makes the room feel safer, so we begin to explore.

Safe is just another word for scared.

I think at this point, safety isn't a feeling, it's a process. Starting with trust.

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.

The old view was that delicacy of language was part of the nature, the sacred nature, of eros and that to speak about it in any other way would be to misunderstand it. What has disappeared is the risk and the hope of human connectedness embedded in eros. Ours is a language that reduces the longing for an other to the need for individual, private satisfaction and safety.