Ally Condie quotes:

In my own life, I'm pretty good at choosing between good and bad. It's the choices between good and good I find the most difficult to make.

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

One of the things I've always liked about my husband is he's 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 he's very analytical and mathematical in addition to his artsy side.

I was born and raised in southern Utah.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Reaching and reached. Cassia

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.

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.

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.

El tiempo que pasamos juntos es como una tormenta, como viento huracanado y lluvia, como algo demasiado grande para controlarlo pero demasiado poderoso para poder eludirlo. Sopla a mi alrededor y me enreda el cabello, me deja la cara mojada, hace que me sienta viva, viva, viva."

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

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.

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.

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.

I could write paper people and I would love them too; I could make them almost real.

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

Do not go gentle. So I fight. I fight the only way I know how.

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.

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.

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

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

Sometimes you can't speak, not because others won't let you, but because you are afraid of what you'll say.

Love changes what is probable and makes unlikely things possible.

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.

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

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.

I had really great parents who always gave me lots of opportunity for choice, but I didn't 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 haven't thought of yet.'

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

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

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

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

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?

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

Why are some things easier to write than say?

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

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.

Love changes what is probable and makes unlikely things possible

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

Because I feel no anger toward my mother. Only loss, and loss is a feeling you canâ??t fight your way out of as easily.

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

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.

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

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

I love. The most reckless thing of all.

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

Once you want something, everything changes.

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

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.

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.

Some things are created to be together.

Does loving someone mean you want them to be safe? Or that you want them to be able to choose?

Caring about anyone leaves you vulnerable.

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

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.

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

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

Teens find out a lot from other teens.

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

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.

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

And it is strange that absence can feel like presence.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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