Quotes by Ally Condie

Isnt it funny how the memories you cherish before a breakup can become your worst enemies afterwards? The thoughts you loved to think about, the memories you wanted to hold up to the light and view from every angle--it suddenly seems a lot safer to lock them in a box, far from the light of day and throw away the key. Its not an act of bitterness. Its an act if self-preservation. Its not always a bad idea to stay behind the window and look out at life instead, is it?

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)

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 whys, you can love those parts too, and its a love at once more complicated and more complete.

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)

Love changes what is probable and makes unlikely things possible.

And Ill tell her that I dont want my life to be samples and scraps. A taste of everything but a meal of nothing.

In the end you cant always choose what to keep. You can only choose how you let it go.

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.

at first when the rain fell from the sky so wide and deepit smelled like sage, my favorite smellI went up on the plateau to watch it cometo see the gifts it always broughtbut this rain changed from blue to black and leftnothing.

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

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

But then I realize that even if I did have a soul, it’s not as though someone else would be there. It would only be more of me.

Ever since the day of the mistake with my Match. Ive never known which life is my true one. Even with the reassurances of the Offical that day in the greenspace, I think a part of me hasnt felt at peace. It was as though I saw for the first time that life could branch into different paths, take different directions.

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 dont know if doing that would heal me or make my heart break entirely, but either way this constant hungry waiting would be over.

...I do not know how I can feel this much pain and survive, and at the same time know how much I have to live.

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

The only chance of success is to trust in your own power.

Some people think the stars must look closer from up here. They dont. When youre up here, you realize how distant they really are—how impossible to reach.

Some people think the stars must look closer from up here. They dont.When youre up here, you realize how distant they really are--how impossible to reach.

Reaching and reached. Cassia