Carve the Mark (Carve the Mark, #1)

by Veronica Roth

Red petals unfurling all at once, showing their bright centers, draping over their stems.

Hushflower bloom

“Honor has no place in survival.”

Honour Quote

“Find another reason to go on,” I said. “It doesn’t have to be a good one, or a noble one. It just has to be a reason.”

There was a hunger inside me, and there always had been. That hunger was stronger than pain, stronger than horror. It gnawed even after everything else inside me had given up. It was not hope; it did not soar; it slithered, clawed, and dragged,

And when I finally named it, I found it was something very simple...

“That’s why I let the little wounds slide,” Vas said. “It’s exhausting, paying this much attention to your own body.” “Hmm,” I said. “I think I might know something about that.”

Chronic pain life

“It’s not an insult,” Zosita said, a little more gently. “Soft hearts make the universe worth living in.”

“‘I tell lies better than I tell truths,’” I said. It was a quote from some poetry I had read on the side of a building with Otega on one of our excursions. I am a Shotet. I am sharp as broken glass, and just as fragile. I tell lies better than I tell truths. I see all of the galaxy and never catch a glimpse of it.

Shotet quote

“I know what it is to become something you hate. I know how it hurts. But life is full of hurt.” Shadows pooled in her eye sockets like they were proving her point. “And your capacity for bearing it is much greater than you believe.”

Capacity

His fingers rested on her skin, dimming the shadows that flowed through her. It was easier, without them, to see that she was beautiful, her hair in long, loose curls, shining in the shifting light, her eyes so dark they looked black. Her aquiline nose, with its fine bones, and the splotch next to her windpipe, a birthmark, its shape somehow elegant.

Cyra description

But that was Cyra, stuffed full of random knowledge.

“I’m not so jaded I don’t remember,” she said, eyes shifting away from his. “That feeling, like everything is broken. Breaking.”

“The pain isn’t me; it doesn’t discriminate,” I said. “The pain is my curse.” “No, no,” the dancer said, her dark eyes locked on mine. But they weren’t brown anymore, as they had been when I saw her perform in the dining room; they were gray, and wary. Akos’s eyes, familiar to me even in a dream. He had taken her place, perched at the edge of the seat as if ready to take flight, his long body dwarfing the chair. “Every currentgift carries a curse,” he said. “But no gift is only a curse.” “The gift part of it is that no one can hurt me,” I said. But even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. People could still hurt me. They didn’t need to touch me to do it—they didn’t even need to torture me to do it. As long as I cared about my life, as long as I cared about Akos’s life, or the lives of renegades I barely knew, I was as vulnerable as everyone else was to hurt. I blinked at him as a different answer came to me. “You told me I was more than a knife, more than a weapon,” I said. “Maybe you’re right.” He smiled that small, familiar smile that creased his cheek. “The gift,” I said, “is the strength the curse has given me.” The new answer was like a blooming hushflower, petals unfurling. “I can bear it. I can bear pain. I can bear anything.” He reached for my cheek. He became the dancer, and my mother, and Otega, in turn.

The realisation

I pulled the pain back, into myself, willing my body to grow darker and darker, like a bottle of ink. I shuddered with the force of that power, that agony. I didn’t scream. I wasn’t afraid. I knew I was strong enough to survive it all.

Strong enough

She made ugly things beautiful, somehow, and he would never understand it. But she was alive.

Cyra Noavek was a name every Thuvhesit knew, a monster story they told to scare each other. What did you say, when you found out the monster wasn’t worthy of the name?

You don’t know how fate finds you, and neither do I. But until it does, we get to be whatever we can be.”

When I woke up after the interrogation—a soldier had told me my heart stopped, then started again of its own accord

“And if it hurts?” And smiled a little. “Life is full of hurt anyway.” Akos’s

This body had carried me through a hard life. It looked exactly the way it was supposed to.

“You saw me as someone better than I was,”

And I began to believe you.

Ask the girl to assassinate her own brother, or fight someone to the death, and she didn’t even blink. But she was afraid of meeting his mother. He smiled.

That was the problem with being so convinced of your own awfulness—you thought other people were lying when they didn’t agree with you.

Just because I wasn’t faint of heart didn’t mean I enjoyed taunting death.

“Oh, I’m not nearly noble enough for that,” I said. “For me it’s all about petty revenge, I promise you.”

you hide behind your throne like a cowering child, and call it law.”

She fell on the hardest, surest truth, again and again, like a woman determined to crush her own bones, knowing they would heal stronger.

What a person did when they were in pain said a lot about them. And Cyra, always in pain, had almost given her life to free him from Shotet prison. He would never forget it. “The translation is difficult,” she continued. “But roughly, one of the lines reads, ‘The heavy heart knows that justice is done.’”

A heavy heart knows when justice is done

All the women I know who suffer from chronic pain, for helping me find Cyra. Teenage girls, because you’re amazing, inspiring, and worthy.