From Allegiant:
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.
---------------
It seems like the rebellions never stop, in the city, in the compound, anywhere. There are just breaths between them, and foolishly, we call those breaths "peace."
---------------
I used to think that when people fell in love, they just landed where they landed, and they had no choice in the matter afterward. And maybe that's true of beginnings, but it's not true of this, now... 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.
From Over Sea, Under Stone:
"You remember the fairy stories you were told when you were very small - 'once upon a time...' Why do you think they always began like that?"
"Because they weren't true," Simon said promptly.
Jane said, caught up in the unreality of the high remote place, "Because perhaps they were true once, but nobody could remember when."
From Death Masks:
"The blood on their hands does not make it right to bloody my own. My choices are measured against my own soul. Not against the stains on theirs."
---------------
"Apocalypse is a frame of mind," he said then. "A belief. A surrender to inevitability."
From The Well of Ascension:
"Good men don't become legends," he said quietly.
"Good men don't need to become legends." She opened her eyes, looking up at him. "They just do what's right anyway."
From The Aeronaut's Windlass:
"The heart of democracy is violence, Miss Tagwynn," Esterbrook said. "In order to decide what to do, we take count of everyone for and against it, and then do whatever the larger side wishes to do. We're having a symbolic battle, its outcome decided by simple numbers. It saves us time and no end of trouble counting actual bodies - but don't mistake it for anything but ritualized violence. And every few years, if the person we elected doesn't do the job we wanted, we vote him out of office - we symbolically behead him and replace him with someone else. Again, without the actual pain and bloodshed, but acting out the ritual of violence nonetheless. It's actually a very practical way of getting things done."
---------------
"The older you get, I should think, the more you will come to understand that the universe is very much a looking glass, Miss Lancaster."
"Meaning what, precisely?"
"That it reflects a great deal more of yourself to your senses than you probably know."
