Explore Book Quotes

″‘Has anyone ever told you that you have a laugh that makes others want to laugh?’ ‘Doter, my neighbor, always says, ‘Miri’s laugh is a tune you love to whistle.‘”

“The guy I like best in the Bible, next to Jesus, was that lunatic and all, that lived in the tombs and kept cutting himself with stones. I like him ten times as much as the disciples.”

There’s no one Karl Lion loves more than his older brother, Jonathan, who is brave, strong, and handsome - everything Karl believes he is not.

“She was alive, and they were dead. She had to try to make her life big.”

The boy early developed a mechanical genius which delighted his father and distracted his mother, for he tried to imitate every machine he saw, and kept the nursery in a chaotic condition, with his ‘sewinsheen’, a mysterious structure of string, chairs, clothespins, and spools, for wheels to go ‘wound and wound’.

“As the sun rose, Esperanza began to feel as if she rose with it. Floating again, like that day on the mountain, when she first arrived in the valley. She closed her eyes, and this time she did not careen out of control. Instead, she glided above the earth, unafraid. She let herself be lifted into the sky, and she knew that she would not slip away.”

“My Leader on a sudden seized me up, Even as a mother who by noise is wakened, And close beside her sees the enkindled flames, Who takes her son, and flies, and does not stop, Having more care of him than of herself…”

“Because you’re from Abnegation,” he says, “and it’s when you’re acting selflessly that you are at your bravest.”

“If I have to learn how other people live, I’d better start now.”

“Why, in exchange for you having blown up my belongings, I’m going to blow up yours and you all with it.”