Marie

“You don’t get to pick where you’re from, but you always have control of where you’re going.”
― Chris Colfer, Struck By Lightning: The Carson Phillips Journal

“Freedom!- is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“What makes you think you have the right to shoot someone?" my father says as he follows me up the path. We pass the tattoo place. Where is Tori now? And Christina?

"Now isn't the time for debates about ethics," I say.

"Now is the perfect time," he says, "because you will soon get the opportunity to shoot someone again, and if you don't realize —"

"Realize what?" I say without turning around. "That every second I waste means another Abnegation dead and another Dauntless made into a murderer? I've realized that. Now it's your turn."

"There is a right way to do things."

"What makes you so sure that you know what it is?" I say.”
― Veronica Roth, Divergent