💬 Quotes

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there, and they don't want you back."

"I am the monarch of my own small, contained universe, governed by laws only I can interpret."

"The Wasp Factory doesn't just kill; it gives a meaning to the suffering. It turns chaos into a tally."

"We are all trapped by the gender we are assigned, but I have found a way to exist in the spaces between."

"She had made him leave his old self behind and come into her world, and then she had let him go, but he was not the same person."

"You have to believe in something, and you have to be willing to pay for it."

"Now it was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength."

"The world was too big and too mean, and he was too small and too scared, but at least he could hide in the woods."

"The Selection is not a prison. It’s a gift. A chance at a better life."

"I want you to break my heart. Do with it what you will."

"I’m not a princess. I’m just a girl who happens to be in a competition to become one."

"My life was never meant to be easy. It was meant to be lived."

"I don't want you to be anything other than what you are. And what you are is enough."

"Sometimes you have to step forward to realize how far you've come."

"The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future."

"He was a very remarkable person. In the queer head of his, the seeds of all these things had grown into a sort of monstrous greatness."

"The horror! The horror!"

"It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness."

"Droll thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself—that comes too late—a crop of unextinguishable regrets."

"I felt often that I might have been one of them, had I not been so completely convinced of the reality of my own existence."