Chosen Ones (The Chosen Ones, #1)

by Veronica Roth

Formerly, scholars might have said that it’s simply human nature to devise imaginative stories to explain things we don’t understand or to aggrandize those we perceive to be higher or greater than ourselves.

“Yeah, but she knows about PTSD.” She had never needed an official diagnosis—PTSD was definitely what she had. But it was strange to hear Matt say it so comfortably, like it was the flu.

“Anyone would need therapy, you know,” he said. “After what we’ve all been through. I mean, Ines went.” “Ines went, and she’s still booby-trapping her apartment like she’s living out a Home Alone fantasy,”

Matt’s weapons were generosity, kindness, social grace. Sloane’s were detachment, a tall stature, and a relentlessly flat affect.

There were parts of him she would just never access, a language she would never hear him speak, because when she was present, the words were gone.

She had been told that things got easier with time, but so far it hadn’t been true. The burst of joy and triumph that had come after the Dark One fell had faded, and what was left was this niggling sense of dissatisfaction and the awareness of everything lost on the way to victory.

It was a strange thing, to know with certainty that you had peaked.

Matt was looking at her in a way she didn’t like. Like she was a car that had broken down on the side of the road and he was looking under the hood to see what the problem was. Like there was something wrong inside her that he could make right. And maybe that was the entire problem with them—he didn’t see her; he saw who she could be with a few adjustments, and all she wanted was to stay busted and be left alone.

“Except this is me, telling you,” Sloane said, her voice suddenly firmer. “The Dark One sucked out all my insides. I know it. Everyone knows it. Except you.”

Sometimes Sloane wondered if the world had been worth saving.

Some things split your life in half.

The lost time had plagued her more than she would have expected it to—the idea that her body had no memory of its own, that she could not interrogate it for the answer.