Ally Condie Quotes

All of the things that were shown in early studies to be good for longevity—happy marriages, healthy bodies—are ours to have. We live long,good lives. We die on our eightieth birthdays, surrounded by our families, before dementia sets in. Cancer, heart disease, and most debilitatingillnesses are almost entirely eradicated. This is as close to perfect as any society has ever managed to get.

~ Ally Condie

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

~ Ally Condie

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.

~ Ally Condie

Ky gives me three gifts for my birthday. A poem, a kiss and the hopeless, beautiful belief that things might work. When I open my eyes... I say, I didn't give you anything for your birthday, i don't even know when it is. And he says, Don't worry about that and I say, What can I do? and he answers, Let me believe in this, all of this, and you believe it too.And I do.

~ Ally Condie

It's been so long since I've let myself feel anger that I don't just feel it. It covers my mouth and I swallow it down, the taste sharp and metal as though I'm gnawing through foilware.

~ Ally Condie

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.

~ Ally Condie

Until now, I've never been able to see while I fly, and I feel a dizzying lightness as I look out at the land bel

~ Ally Condie

No,' she says, as if the suggestion is ridiculous. 'I wouldn't go back to where I'm from. I'd go someplace I've never been.

~ Ally Condie

Good-bye,” I say to Grandfather, and to my father, and I hold the tube in the river and pause a moment. We hold the choices of our fathers and mothers in our hands and when we cling on or let them slip between our fingers, those choices become our own.

~ Ally Condie

Did you know Grandfather would give the poems to me?” I ask.“We thought he might,” my mother says.“Why didn’t you stop him?”“We didn’t want to take away your choices,” my mother says.“But Grandfather never did tell me about the Rising,” I say.“I think he wanted you to find your own way,” my mother says. She smiles. “In that way, he was a true rebel. I think that’s why he chose that argument with your father as his favorite memory. Though he was upset when the fight happened, later he came to see that your father was strong in choosing his own path, and he admired him for it.

~ Ally Condie

They were too much to carryso i left them behindfor a new life, in a new placebut no one forgot who i wasi didn'tand neither did the people who watchthey watched for yearsthey watch now

~ Ally Condie

It strikes me that perhaps this is part of what we are fighting to choose. Which pain to feel.

~ Ally Condie

It was a little thing, a baby tree, but still it tangled with things around it and required care to move. And when she pulled it out, it's roots still clung to Earth from it's old home.

~ Ally Condie

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.

~ Ally Condie

...there's a difference between knowledge and technology. Knowledge don't fail us.

~ Ally Condie

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.

~ Ally Condie

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

~ Ally Condie

I keep telling myself that, and most of the time I believe it.

~ Ally Condie

They could not write their names, but I can write mine, and I will again, somewhere where it will last for a long, long time. I will find Ky, and then I will find that place.

~ Ally Condie

I don't know what happens after we die. It doesn't seem to me like there can be much past this. But I suppose I can conceive that what we make and do can last beyond us. Maybe in a different place, on another plane.

~ Ally Condie

He watches the sun out of the world and the stars into it and sometimes I wonder if he watches the sun come up again. Is it hard to sleep when you know you are almost at the end? Do you not want to miss a moment, even those that would otherwise seem dull and unremarkable?

~ Ally Condie

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.

~ Ally Condie

I have tried to be righteous all my life. Yet I have never been content.

~ Ally Condie

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?

~ Ally Condie

The Society wants us to be afraid of dying. But I'm not. I'm only afraid of dying wrong.

~ Ally Condie

It dances on the air for a moment before it falls, too. A fresh gust of wind almost saves it, but a worker catches sight of it and lifts a tube up to suck the paper from the air, to suck the words from the sky.I'm sorry, Grandfather.

~ Ally Condie

And it is strange that absence can feel like presence.

~ Ally Condie

I'm so

~ Ally Condie

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.

~ Ally Condie

The rain turns lighter, turns to snow. And 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.

~ Ally Condie

People can be miracles.

~ Ally Condie

There is so much want. I feel it so much that I am water, a river of want, pooled in the shape of a girl named Cassia.

~ Ally Condie

I draw in a ragged breath, the kind you take when the pain is too deep to cry, when you can't cry because all you are is pain, and if you let some of it out, you might cease to exist.

~ Ally Condie

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

~ Ally Condie

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.

~ Ally Condie

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.

~ Ally Condie

Everyone dies. The don't all have the chance to see what they wanted most. At least I've seen the Above. At least I've known True.

~ Ally Condie

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.

~ Ally Condie

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

~ Ally Condie

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.

~ Ally Condie