“Girls at war opt for a quieter cruelty than fistfights and drive-by shootings. Girls circumvent the corporeal and go straight for each other's souls. The bleeding is harder to stanch.”

“Why,' I said, quite surprised by my own eloquence in inventing all this stuff, 'it happens every day. The old old story. Boys and girls fall in love, that is, they are driven mad and go blind and deaf and see each other not as human animals with comic noses and bandy legs and voices like frogs, but as angels so full of shining goodness that like hollow turnips with candles put into them, they seem miracles of beauty. And the next minute the candles shoot out sparks and burn their eyes. And they seem to each other like devils, full of spite and cruelty. And they will drive each other mad unless they have grown some imagination. Even enough to laugh.”

“If you're going to go to war against the System, just do your shooting like a nice, intelligent girl ㅡ because the enemy's there, and not because you don't like his hairdo or his goddamn necktie.”

“On the face of it, no one could have been less equipped for the job than these gently nurtured girls who walked straight out of Edwardian drawingrooms into the manifold horrors of the First World War.”

“Girls who want to be warriors can't afford to be so careless. And: Girls will bleed, and they will cry.”

“Let me get this straight. So you left the Dauntless compound to get ready for war... and took your makeup bag with you?""Yep. Figured it would be harder for anyone to shoot me if they saw how devastatingly attractive I was...”