Quotes by Ally Condie

Everyone dies. The dont all have the chance to see what they wanted most. At least Ive seen the Above. At least Ive known True.

What are the gifts given to we who live Below?Long life, health, strength, and happiness.What is the curse of those who live Above?Short life, illness, weakness, and misery.Is this fair?It is fair. It is as the gods decreed at the time of the Divide. Some have to stay Above so that humanity might survive Below.Then give thanks.

So much of life is in the smallness of moments...but they are harder to mark. So we need the grander celebrations and occasions. People like to feel significant

I love you.lightning. Once it has forked, hot-white, from sky to earth, there is no going back.Its 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.

Hes throwing everything he can into the air on the chance that something might take flight. And were the smallest, weakest bird.

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.

It could have been different, I say, almost under my breath. If Id kissed Indie again after she kissed me. If I hadnt known Cassia before I met Indie.But its not, Indie says, and shes right.

Ill stand next to that fountain and wait until the Official find me. And when she does and asks me what Im doing, Ill tell her and everyone else that I know: t hey are giving us pieces of a real life instead of the whole thing. And Ill tell her that I dont want my life to be samples and scraps. A taste of everything but a meal of nothing.

We do not kiss. We do nothing but hold on and breathe, but still I know. I cannot go gently now. Not even for the sake of my parents, my family.Not even for Xander.

One of the things Ive always liked about my husband is hes very good at lots of stuff. He was an English teacher when I met him. He wrote poetry and played the guitar. As time went on, he decided to go into economics, so hes very analytical and mathematical in addition to his artsy side.

Being a teen is past for me. Worrying about the world and my place in it is not.

The beauty of dystopia is that it lets us vicariously experience future worlds - but we still have the power to change our own.

“Love has different shades. Like the way I loved Cassia when I thought shed 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. Its 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Love changes what is probable and makes unlikely things possible.”