Ally Condie Quotes

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

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

When we read dystopia, we root for these people to break free because we are these people; hoping and fighting against things that are bigger than ourselves.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Some things are created to be together.

Isn't 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. It's not an act of bitterness. It's an act if self-preservation. It's not always a bad idea to stay behind the window and look out at life instead, is it?

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

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

Love changes what is probable and makes unlikely things possible

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

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

Why are some things easier to write than say?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Once you want something, everything changes.

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

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

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.

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

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

There is something extraordinary about the first time falling.

I love. The most reckless thing of all.

And it is strange that absence can feel like presence.

Everyone has something of beauty about them. But loving let's 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.

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

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

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.

And I laugh at myself for thinking I could touch the sky.

I had really great parents who always gave me lots of opportunity for choice, but I didnt always realize how rare that was for a girl for them to say, You can be a mom or have a career or do both or do something we havent thought of yet.

Teens find out a lot from other teens.

Theres nothing like reading about a world that feels dead to throw your own beautiful, colorful life into sharp relief.

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

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.

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