Ally Condie Quotes

Growing apart doesn't change the fact that for a long time we grew side by side; our roots will always be tangled. I'm glad for that.

Every minute you spend with someone gives them a part of your life and takes part of theirs.

It is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures.

Is falling in love with someone's story the same thing as falling in love with the person himself?

In the end you can't always choose what to keep. You can only choose how you let it go.

Once you want something, everything changes.

We could have been happy. I know that, and it is perhaps the hardest thing to know.

Now that I've found the way to fly, which direction should I go into the night?

Why are some things easier to write than say?

But if you were Matched," I say softly, "What do you think she'd be like?" "You," he says, almost before I've finished. "You.

That’s how I know they are dreams. Because the simple and plain and everyday things are the ones that we can never have. (Cassia Reyes)

I think of how perhaps the best way to fly would be with hands full of earth, so you always remember where you came from.

Love changes what is probable and makes unlikely things possible.

You cannot change your journey if you are unwilling to move at all.

Cassia. I know which life is my real one now, no matter what happens. It’s the one with you. For some reason, knowing that even one person knows my story makes things different. Maybe it’s like the poem says. Maybe this is my way of not going gentle. I love you. (Ky Markham)

Ky can play this game. He can play all of their games, including the one in front of him that he just lost. He knows exactly how to play, and that's why he loses every time.

I love. The most reckless thing of all.

Our time together feels like a storm, like a wild wind and rain, like something too big to handle but too powerful to escape.

I came up on the screen, too, Cassia. But he was the one you chose to see.

I want to reach out and grab his hand and hold it to me, right over my heart, right where it aches the most. I don't know if doing that would heal me or make my heart break entirely, but either way this constant hungry waiting would be over.

It is one thing to make a choice and it is another thing to never have the chance.

Red is the first color of spring. It's the real color of rebirth. Of beginning.

I wonder if I will ever have the strength to hold onto something. Or if I will always be someone who destroys.

His lips move silently, and I know what he says: the words of a poem that only two people in the world know.

No one should die alone.

I am trapped in glass and I want to break out and breath deep but I´m too afraid that it will hurt.

Forgetting lets you live without the pain for a moment but remembering hits hard.

I climb into the dark for you Are you waiting in the stars for me?

I realize now how much courage it takes to choose the life you want, whatever that might be.

Did the poet know how lucky he was, to have such beautiful words and a place to put them and keep them?

What is it about your voice that makes me want to hear you speak?

Remembering is part of thinking, but not all of it.

How can we appreciate anything fully when overwhelmed with too much?

In a story, you can turn to the front and begin again and everyone lives once more. That doesn't work in real life.

Once you want something, everything changes. Now I want everything. More and more and more.

It's all right to wonder.

Everyone has something of beauty about them. But loving lets you look, and look, and look again. You notice the back of a hand, the turn of a head, the way of a walk. When you first love, you look blind and you see it all as the glorious, beloved whole, or a beautiful sum of beautiful parts. But when you see the one you love as pieces, as why's, you can love those parts too, and it's a love at once more complicated and more complete.

I wish I could have one without the other, but that's the problem with being alive. You don't usually get to choose the measure of suffering or the degree of joy you have.

If you let hope inside, it takes you over. It feeds on your insides and uses your bones to climb and grow. Eventually it becomes the thing that is your bones, that holds you together. Holds you up until you don't know how to live without it anymore. To pull it out of you would kill you entirely.

There's a reason they didn't keep this poem. This poem tells you to fight.

Words mean what you want them to mean.

So in the middle of all the noise, I point to the sky. I hope he understands what I mean, because I mean so many things: My heart will always fly his name. I won't go gentle. I'll find a way to soar like the angels in the stories and I will find him. And I know he understands as he looks straight at me, deep into my eyes. His lips move silently, and I know what he says: the words of a poem that only two people in the world know. Tears well up but I blink them away. Because if there is one moment in my life that I want to see clearly, this is it.

In the absence of real thunder, he's making his own.

It's not knowing how to write that makes you interesting, it's what you write.

There is ebb and flow. Leaving and coming. Flight and fall. Sing and silent. Reaching and reached.

This is a cruel thing to do because when someone knows your story they know you. And they can hurt you. It's why I give mine away in pieces, even to Cassia.

Everyone has something of beauty about them.

Are you congratulating me on my life, or on my death?

We can either try to change everything or just make the most of whatever time we have.

When we fall in love the first time, we don’t know anything. We risk a lot less than we do if we choose to love again. (Xander)

For what is the point of having something lovely if you never share it? It would be like having a poem, a beautiful wild poem that no one else has, and burning it.

I like the places where one part meets another, I think, eyes to cheek, wrist to hands.

This is a difficult balance, telling the truth: how much to share, how much to keep, which truths will wound but not ruin, which will cut too deep to heal.

I see his eyes, bright with life adnfire, and I know he won't stop fighting. Even if it's the kind of quiet fight on the inside that you can't always see. And I won't stop fighting either.

I remember what Anna called the three of us. The Pilot. The Poet. The Physic. They are in all of us. I believe this. They every person might have a way to fly, a line of poetry to put down for others to see, a hand to heal.

Water's always moving. It's never the same.

They are giving us pieces of a real life instead of the whole thing. They have perfected the art of giving us just enought freedom; just enough that when we are ready to snap, a little bone is offered and we roll over, belly up, comfortable and placated like a dog... - Cassia

Even if he didn't live his story, enough of us have lives just like it. So it's true anyway.

It's nice, isn't it... to be part of something greater than yourself.

And I'll tell her that I don't want my life to be samples and scraps. A taste of everything but a meal of nothing.

And as the Society reminds us, there's a difference between knowledge and technology. Knowledge doesn't fail us.

Love has different shades. Like the way I loved Cassia when I thought she'd never love me. The way I loved her on the Hill. The way I love her now that she came into the canyon for me. It's different. Deeper. I thought I loved her and wanted her before, but as we walk through the canyon together I realize this could be more than a new shade. A whole new color.

Because once you love, it is gone. You love and you cannot call it back.

I didn't know all that was inside of him, either. I thought I did, but people run deep and complicated like rivers, hold their shape and are carved upon like stone.

Cassia and I sit as near to each other as we can. She leans into me and I keep my arms around her. I don't fool myself that I hold her together- she does that on her own- but holding her keeps me from flying apart.

Only when I hold onto nothing can I be the best, only then can I be what they expect me to be.

We have all been carved out by our sorrow. Cut deep like canyon walls.

And it strikes me that this is how writing anything is, really. A collaboration between you who give the words and they who take them and find meaning in them, or put music behind them, or turn them aside because they were not what was needed.

I run for her. I run for them. For me.

Because either way, whichever life I build, has to be built on truth.

Some things are created to be together.

This is the difference between us. I live to sort, he knows how to create.

I know how it feels when people look right through you, or worse, see you as something or someone other than what you are.

Do you think you could let someone go if you thought it was best for them?

It's never really lost to you as long as you remember it.

Oh yes. His voice has music.

And it is strange that absence can feel like presence.

Because in the end you can't always choose what to keep. You can only choose how you let it go.

Which goes to show that caring about anyone leaves you vulnerable.

Sometimes paper is just paper, words are just words. Ways to capture the real thing. Don't be afraid to remember that.

Green tablet. Green space. Green eyes. Green girl.

Some people think the stars must look closer from up here. They don't. When you're up here, you realize how distant they really are—how impossible to reach.

So in the middle of all the noise, I point to the sky. I hope he understands what I mean, because I mean so many things: My heart will always fly his name. I won't go gentle. I'll find a way to soar life the angels in the stories and I will find him.

They were too much to carry so I left them behind for a new life, in a new place but no one forgot who I was.

I love you." lightning. Once it has forked, hot-white, from sky to earth, there is no going back. It's time. I feel it, I know it. My eyes on him, his on me, and both of us breathing, watching, tired of of waiting. Ky close his eyes, but mine are still open. what will it feel like, his lips on mine? Like a secret told, a promise kept? Like that line in the poem-a shower of all my days- silvery rain falling all around me, where the lighting meets the earth? The whistle blows below us and the moment breaks. We are safe. For now.

Writing, painting, singing- it cannot stop everything. Cannot halt death in its tracks. But perhaps it can make the pause between death’s footsteps sound and look and feel beautiful, can make the space of waiting a place where you can linger without as much fear. For we are all walking each other to our deaths, and the journey there between footsteps makes up our lives.

I wonder if death will always taste this good

It was as though I saw for the first time that life could branch into different paths, take different directions.

Of course, one person can be the world.

I decided that it was the thoughts in your own mind that mattered more than anything else.

Maybe only parts of our stories can keep us safe. The whole can feel like too much to bear.

He's in pain. I am, too. It strikes me that perhaps this is part of what we are fighting to choose. Which pain we feel.

If I couldn’t name it, would I even know what it is? Would I even feel it at all?

Our time together feels like a storm, like wild wind and rain, like something too big to handle but too powerful to escape. It blows around me and tangles my hair, leaves water on my face, makes me know that I am alive, alive, alive. There are moments of calm and pause as there are in every storm, and moments when our words fork lightening, at least for each other.

Things happen whether you deserve them or not

Death,” I say. “ It’s the one thing they haven’t fully conquered. They want to know more about it.

We don't need to understand everything.

You know" - Hale's breath was warm against Kat's ear in the chilly ballroom- "I don't know that both of us really have to be here...." The slide changed. While hundreds of mathematicians waited with baited breath, the boy beside Kat whispered, "I could go make some calls... check on some things..." "Play some blackjack?" "Well, when in Rome..." "Rome is tomorrow, babe," Kat reminded him. He nodded. "Right.

If you stay here, you become lost. And no one can find you. I like lost.

Lightning. Once it has forked, hot-white, from sky to earth, there is no going back

Long ago people used to say what they wanted out loud and hope that someone would give it to them. They called it praying.

When you can’t cry because all you are is pain, and if you let some of it out, you might cease to exist.

I marked a map for every death For every ache and blow My world was all a page of black With nothing left but snow.

... and of all the words I have hidden and saved and treasured, these are the ones I will never forget, the most important ones of all.

I have a sense that we have not yet arrived, that we are still reaching. For each other. For who we are meant to be.

The earth reflects the sky and the sky meets the earth and, every now and then, if we’re lucky, we have a moment to see how small we are.

It’s harder to break something than you would think. I wonder if the Society is finding this to be true of me as well.

Ky always acts as though someone watches him. And, apparently, he watches back.

None of that is supposed to matter. But somehow, it does.

Let me believe in this, all of this, and you believe it too. (Ky Markham)

Which one is the true one, I don’t ask, they don’t tell.

Newrose, Oldrose, Quean Anne's lace. Water, river, stone and sun Wind over hill, under tree. Past the border none can see. Climbing into dark for you, Will you climb in stars for me? P.124

Can you climb high enough to get above the clouds, look down on the rain from a place in the sun?

I believe in you," he says, his voice hushed and almost reverent. "That's more faith than I ever thought I'd have.

Being with Ky, being with Xander -both things feel like standing in the light. Different types of light, but neither feels dark.

I never named anything I've written before no reason to since it would all have the same title anyway -for you- but I would call this one one night that night when we let the world be only you and only me we stood on it while it spun green and blue and red the music ended but we were still singing

For a moment, I’m a part of it all. Then I’m just apart.

Two little dark figures, looking up. Are they looking at me? Is is him? This far away there's only one way to know. I point to the sky.

But I've already broken the glass; I've given the green away; I've made my choice.

But if you were Matched," I say softly, "what do you think she'd be life?" "You," he says, almost before I've finished. "You." We do not kiss. We do nothing bu hold on and breather, but still I know. I cannot go gently now.

It's hard to know which ways to be strong.

think of him risking everything each time he slips one napkin into his pocket. All these years he’s been so careful, but now he’s willing to take a chance. Because he’s found someone who wants to know. Someone he wants to tell.

I wouldn't take that tablet Cassia. Not for a report. And perhaps not ever. You are strong enough to go without it.

You don’t usually get to choose the measure of suffering or the degree of joy you have. (Ky Markham)

Time, Vick said, "is what we don't have.

And when I see Ky again, which I know will happen, I will whisper the words I have written in his ear, against his lips. And they will change from ash and nothing into flesh and blood.

I'm falling in love. I am in love. and it's not with Xander, though I do love him. I'm sure of that, as sure as I am of the fact what I feel for Ky is something different.

I see a glint in her eye as she looks at me and it makes me smile. Hold our breath? she seems to say. Move the earth? We've been doing that all along.

Cassia. Even far away, I know it's her by the way her dark hair tangles with the wind and how she stands on the red rocks of the Carving. She's more beautiful than snow. Is this real? She points to the sky.

It’s not exactly easy to save things for the future when the present is so uncertain. (Xander)

My mother painted with water," he says. "And my father played with fire.

It’s all right to wonder

I'm drawn to him and tied to him with the cords of a thousand different memories.

I'm standing in a river. It's blue. Dark blue. Reflecting the color of the evening sky.

But he is as we all are: light as air, transient as wisps of cloud before the sun, beautiful and fleeting, and if I ever did truly have hold of him, that has ended now.

There is satisfaction in knowing that something good and right and true was part of you. That you had the blessing, gift, good fortune, perfect luck, to know someone like this, to pass through fire and water and stone and sky together and emerge, all of you, strong enough to hold on, strong enough to let go. (Cassia)

She wraps her arms around me and speaks in my ear. Words just for me--the poetry of I love you--to keep me warm in the cold. With them she turns me back from ash and nothing into flesh and blood.

I know you love me. I love you, I always will, but things can't hold like this. They have to break. You say you don't mind, that you will wait for me, but I think that you do mind, and you should. Because we've done too much waiting in our lives, Xander. Don't wait for me anymore. I hope for love for you. I hope for this more than anything else, maybe even more than my own happiness. And in a way, perhaps that means I love Xander best of all.

Lying in bed, my body and soul bruised and tired, I realize that the Officials are right. Once you want something, everything changes. Now I want everything. More and more and more. I want to pick my work position. Marry who I choose. Eat pie for breakfast and run down a real street instead of on a tracker. Go fast when I want and slow when I want. Decide which poems I want to read and what words I want to write. There is so much that I want. I feel it so much that I am water, a river of want, pooled in the shape of a girl named Cassia.

He knows exactly how to play, and that's why he loses every time

Why?” Lon asks in a whine. “We spent half the summer marking these paths!” I think I see a faint smile on Ky’s face and I realize that he likes Lon. Who asks the questions no one else will ask even though he never gets an answer. It strikes me that this is a kind of bravery. A wearing-down kind of bravery, but bravery nonetheless.

Watching Ky wake is better than a sunrise.

Sometimes it's faster and more efficient to destroy.

The word is yes.

Inside me are the real things that give me strength—my thoughts, the small stones of my own choosing. They tumble in my mind, some polished from frequent turning, some new and rough, some that cut.

There is something extraordinary about the first time falling.

In the end you can't always choose what to keep. You can only choose how to let it go.

I couldn’t sleep all night, worrying that I’d gotten you in trouble. I care about you.

Everyday the sun rolls by Across the sky and through night's door Every night the stars light high Above the Earth and shine once more Any day her boat might fly Across the waves and to the shore

Ky is heavy in my mind, deep in my heart, his palms warm on my empty hands. I have to try to find him. Loving him gave me wings and all my work has given me the strength to move them.

at first when the rain fell from the sky so wide and deep it smelled like sage, my favorite smell I went up on the plateau to watch it come to see the gifts it always brought but this rain changed from blue to black and left nothing.

We are not lost mermaids with seaweed hair and coins for eyes, but human girls, alive and found. We are sisters, and we did not drown.

No." "Why?" "No one needs to know," I say. "To know what?How long you've lasted?" Vick asks. "To know anything about me," I say.

No one knows anything," Vick says. "Except Ky. He thinks he's found the truth in a girl.

If I can't pull myself together soon he'll know somethings wrong. We know each other too well.

Ky's story, bit by bit, is turning to ash and nothing. Except. He remembers it, and now I do, too.

Not many people know how to make letters like this," he says. "Do you ever teach anyone?" "Only once," I say.

Once you want something, everything changes. Now I want everything. I feel it so much that I am water, a river of want,pooled in the shape of a girl.

Because I feel no anger toward my mother. Only loss, and loss is a feeling you can’t fight your way out of as easily.

My words never last long. I have to destroy them before anyone sees them. But. I remember them all. For some reason, the act of writing them down makes me remember. Each word I write brings me closer to finding the right ones. And when I see Ky again, which I know will happen, I will whisper the words I have written in his ear, against his lips. and they will change from ash and nothing into flesh and blood.

When we fall in love the first time, we don't know anything. We risk a lot less than we do if we choose to love again. There is something extraordinary about the first time falling.

Everything I dream is something simple and plain and everyday. That’s how I know they are dreams. Because the simple and plain and everyday things are the ones that we can never have

So I fight. I fight the only way I know, with thinking of Ky, even thought the pain of missing him is so strong I can hardly stand it... I think of him, I think of him, I think of him.

I'm just a butterfly, a mourning cloak, sealed inside a cocoon with blnd eyes and stiky wings. And suddenly I wonder if the cocoons sometimes do not open, if the butterfly inside is ever simply not strong enough to break through.

For we are all walking each other to our deaths, and the journey between footsteps makes up our lives(Cassia 'Reached')

They are giving us pieces of a real life instead of the whole thing.

my soul, the mythical part of humans that the angels cared about.

Each word I write brings me closer to finding the right ones.

And then he says it, right there on the Hill, and of all the words I have hidden and saved and treasured, these are the ones I will never forget, the most important ones of all. 'I love you.

And it is strange that absence can feel like presence. A missing so complete that if it were to go away, I would turn around, stunned, to see that the room is empty after all, when before it at least had something, if not him.

I can trust in my parents' love. And it strikes me that is a big thing to trust, a big thing to have had, no matter what else happens.

Ky smiles then, a smile I've never seen before. It's the kind of daring, reckless smile that could make people follow him straight into a firing, a flood.

What do you think she would say about my Match?" I ask him. "About what happened today?" He's quiet, and I wait. "I think she would ask you if you wondered.

I could write stories; I could hide from the world and make my own instead of trying to change it or live in it. I could make paper people and I would love them too; I could make them almost real.

When things like this happen—when what was meant to help results in harm, when a salve brings pain instead of healing—it is clear how wrong even choices intended to be right can become.

Any other questions?" "Just one," I say. "What color are your eyes?" I want to know what he thinks, how he sees himself - the real Ky - when he dares to look. "Blue," he says sounding surprised, "they've always been blue." "Not to me." "What do they look like to you?" he says puzzled, amused. Not looking at my mouth anymore, looking into my eyes. "Lots of colors," I say. "At first I thought they were brown. Once I thought they were green..." "What are they now?" he asks. He widens his eyes a little, leans closer, lets me look as long and deep as I want. "Well?" "Everything," I tell him, "They're everything.

Reading the situation correctly is part of getting through it safely.

The salt of his tears tastes like the sea and I don't see the shore.

Good-byes are like this. You can’t always mark them well at the moment of separation—no matter how deep they cut. (Ky Markham)

Death will not take the people I love. Our journey will end differently.

For we are all walking each other to our deaths, and the journey between footsteps makes up our lives.

My fingers smell like soil and my lips taste like sugar and I'm so awake right now I wonder if I'll be able to sleep tonight.

If you love someone, if someone loved you, if they taught you to write and made it so you could speak, how can you do nothing at all? You might as well take their words out of the dirt and try to snatch them from the wind. Because once you love, it is gone. You love and you cannot call it back.

For a moment nothing happens. The figure stands still and I stand cold and alive and- He starts to run. I make my way down the rocks, slipping, sliding, trying to get to the plain. I wish, I think, my feet clumsy, moving too fast, not fast enough, I wish i could run, I wish I'd written a whole poem, I wish I kept the compass- And then I reach the plain and wish for nothing but what I have. Ky. Running toward me. I have never seen him run like this, fast, free, strong, wild. He looks so beautiful, his body moves so right. He stops just close enough for me to see the blue of his eyes and forget the red on my hands and the green I wish I wore. "You're here," he says, breathing hard and hungry. sweat and dirt cover his face, and he looks at me as though I'm the only thing he ever needed to see. I open my mouth to say yes. But I only have time to breathe in before he closes the last of the distance. All I know is the kiss.

For one entire day I let his kiss burn on my cheek and into my blood and I don't push the memory away... This kiss, these words, they feel like beginning.

I don't fool myself that I hold her together—she does that on her own—but holding her keeps me from flying apart.

Ky still looks at me and I wonder for a moment if he is going to ask me what I am thinking about. But of course, he doesn't. He doesn't learn things by asking questions... He learns by watching.

There are many of them in the world, I think, good men and women with their frail deeds. Wondering what might have been, how things might have danced, if we had only dared to be bright.

She cried before she slept. I reached out to touch the ends of her hair. She didn't notice. I didn't know what to do. Listening to her made me ache. I felt tears stream down my face too. And when I accidentally brushed Eli with my arm his face was wet where his tears ran down. We have all been carved out by our sorrow. Cut deep like canyon walls.

The Society isn't human, but the people work for it sometimes are.

Blue is the most common eye color in Oria Province, but there is something different about his eyes and I'm not sure what it is. More depth? I wonder what he sees when he looks at me. If he seems to have depth to me, do I seem shallow and transparent to him?

One night," Ky says, "doesn't seem like much to ask." I don't speak. He moves closer and I feel his cheek against mine and breathe in the scent of sage and pine, of old dust and fresh water and of him. "For one night, can we just think of each other? Not the Society or the Rising or even our families?" "No," I say. "No what?" He tangles one of his hands in my hair, the other draws me closer still. "No, I don't think we can," I say. "And no, it isn't too much to ask.

The darkness behind doesn't worry me; neither do the stars ahead. I think of how perhaps the best way to fly would be with hands full of earth so you always remember where you came from, how hard walking could be.

My mother looks at me with love and understanding, and I realize: she knows what my father did. She knows what I want. She knows and even though she would not destroy a tissue sample or love someone who is not her Match, she still loves us, even though we have done those things.

My dad used to say that life was like turning the pages in a book. 'Oh, look,' he'd say, pretending to flip the pages in the air after we'd had something bad happen to us. 'Bad luck here on page ninety-seven. And on ninety-eight. But something good here on ninety-nine! All you had to do was keep reading!

Was [Sisyphus] from your province? 'I don't know. I don't know if he's real,' Ky says. 'If he ever existed.' 'Then why tell his story?' I don't understand, and for a second I feel betrayed. Why did Ky tell me about this person and make me feel empathy for him when there's no proof that he ever lived at all? Ky pauses for a moment before he answers, ...'Even if he didn't live his story, enough of us have lived lives just like it. So it's true anyway.

That's when I realize that the statistics the Officials give us do not matter to me. I know there are many people who are happy and I am glad for them. But this is Ky. If he is the one person who falls by the wayside while the other ninety-nine are happy and fulfilled, that is not right with me anymore. I realize that I don't care about the Officer pacing below or the other hikers among the trees, or really anything else at all, and that is when I realize how dangerous this truly is.

Everyone has something of beauty about them. In the beginning for me, it was Ky's eyes I noticed, and I love the, still. But loving lets you look, and look, and look again. You notice the back of a hand, the turn of a head, the way of a walk. When you first love, you look blind and you see it all as the glorious, beloved whole, or a beautiful sum of beautiful parts. But when you see the one you love as pieces, as whys-why he walks like this, why he closes his eyes like that-you can love those parts, too, and it's a love at once more complicated and more complete.

It's not all gone. She loved someone before and so did I. The Society and the Rising and the world are all still out there, pressing against us. But Lei holds them away. She's made enough space for two people to stand up together, whether or not any Society or Rising says that they can. She's done it before. The amazing thing is that she's not afraid to do it again. When we fall in love the first time, we don't know anything. We risk a lot less than we do if we choose to love again. There is something extraordinary about the first time falling. But if feels even better to find myself standing on solid ground, with someone holding on to me, pulling me back, and know that I'm doing the same for her.

it's Ky's move. In the quiet before the Ky takes his turn, Xander watches him carefully. Ky's hand hovers over the board. For a moment, as he holds the piece in the air, I see where he could put it to win and I know he sees it, too, that he planned the whole game for that last move. He looks at Xander and Xander looks back, both of them locked in some kind of challenge that seems to run deeper and older than what's happening here on this board. Then Ky moves his hand and puts his piece down in a spot where Xander can eventually overtake him for the win. Ky doesn't hessitate once he places the piece; he sets it down with a solid sound and leans back in his chair, looking up at the ceiling. I think I see the slightest hint of a smile on his lips but I can't be sure.