Top 180 Ally Condie Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Love changes what is probable and makes unlikely things possible.”

— Ally Condie

52. “Because either way, whichever life I build, has to be built on truth.”

— Ally Condie

53. “His lips move silently, and I know what he says: the words of a poem that only two people in the world know.”

— Ally Condie

54. “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.”

— Ally Condie

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

— Ally Condie

56. “Ky can play this game. He can play all of their games, including the one in front of him that he just lost. He knows exactly how to play, and that’s why he loses every time.”

— Ally Condie

57. “I run for her. I run for them. For me.”

— Ally Condie

58. “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.”

— Ally Condie

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

— Ally Condie

60. “Which one is the true one, I don’t ask, they don’t tell.”

— Ally Condie

61. “People love a spectacle, an event. Give them something to watch and you will make them happy. “So much of life is in the smallness of moments,” my mother said. “But they are harder to mark. So we need the grander celebrations and occasions. People like to feel significant.”

— Ally Condie

62. “Everyone has something of beauty about them.”

— Ally Condie

63. “In the absence of real thunder, he’s making his own.”

— Ally Condie

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

— Ally Condie

65. “Did the poet know how lucky he was, to have such beautiful words and a place to put them and keep them?”

— Ally Condie

66. “Some people think the stars must look closer from up here. They don’t. When your’e up here, you realize how distant they really are – how impossible to reach.”

— Ally Condie

67. “Even if he didn’t live his story, enough of us have lives just like it. So it’s true anyway.”

— Ally Condie

68. “Once you want something, everything changes. Now I want everything. More and more and more. I want to pick my work position. Marry who I choose. Eat pie for breakfast and run down a real street instead of on a tracker. Go fast when I want and slow when I want. Decide which poems I want to read and what words I want to write. There is so much that I want.”

— Ally Condie

69. “I never named anything I’ve written before no reason to since it would all have the same title anyway -for you- but I would call this one one night that night when we let the world be only you and only me we stood on it while it spun green and blue and red the music ended but we were still singing.”

— Ally Condie

70. “And it strikes me that this is how writing anything is, really. A collaboration between you who give the words and they who take them and find meaning in them, or put music behind them, or turn them aside because they were not what was needed.”

— Ally Condie

71. “I love. The most reckless thing of all.”

— Ally Condie

72. “It’s never really lost to you as long as you remember it.”

— Ally Condie

73. “Because once you love, it is gone. You love and you cannot call it back.”

— Ally Condie

74. “I climb into the dark for you. Are you waiting in the stars for me?”

— Ally Condie

75. “Words mean what you want them to mean.”

— Ally Condie

76. “I wish I could have one without the other, but that’s the problem with being alive. You don’t usually get to choose the measure of suffering or the degree of joy you have.”

— Ally Condie

77. “What is it about your voice that makes me want to hear you speak?”

— Ally Condie

78. “Cassia and I sit as near to each other as we can. She leans into me and I keep my arms around her. I don’t fool myself that I hold her together- she does that on her own- but holding her keeps me from flying apart.”

— Ally Condie

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

— Ally Condie

80. “I wonder if death will always taste this good.”

— Ally Condie

81. “None of that is supposed to matter. But somehow, it does.”

— Ally Condie

82. “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.”

— Ally Condie

83. “Only when I hold onto nothing can I be the best, only then can I be what they expect me to be.”

— Ally Condie

84. “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.”

— Ally Condie

85. “Ky always acts as though someone watches him. And, apparently, he watches back.”

— Ally Condie

86. “Why are some things easier to write than say?”

— Ally Condie

87. “Lying in bed, my body and soul bruised and tired, I realize that the Officials are right. Once you want something, everything changes. Now I want everything. More and more and more. I want to pick my work position. Marry who I choose. Eat pie for breakfast and run down a real street instead of on a tracker. Go fast when I want and slow when I want. Decide which poems I want to read and what words I want to write. There is so much that I 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

88. “Long ago people used to say what they wanted out loud and hope that someone would give it to them. They called it praying.”

— Ally Condie

89. “Teens find out a lot from other teens.”

— Ally Condie

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

— Ally Condie

91. “Oh yes. His voice has music.”

— Ally Condie

92. “So in the middle of all the noise, I point to the sky. I hope he understands what I mean, because I mean so many things: My heart will always fly his name. I won’t go gentle. I’ll find a way to soar like the angels in the stories and I will find him. And I know he understands as he looks straight at me, deep into my eyes. His lips move silently, and I know what he says: the words of a poem that only two people in the world know. Tears well up but I blink them away. Because if there is one moment in my life that I want to see clearly, this is it.”

— Ally Condie

93. “Caring about anyone leaves you vulnerable.”

— Ally Condie

94. “Some things are created to be together.”

— Ally Condie

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

— Ally Condie

96. “Of course, one person can be the world.”

— Ally Condie

97. “It’s all right to wonder.”

— Ally Condie

98. “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.”

— Ally Condie

99. “My fingers smell like soil and my lips taste like sugar and I’m so awake right now I wonder if I’ll be able to sleep tonight.”

— Ally Condie

100. “My dad used to say that life was like turning the pages in a book. ‘Oh, look,’ he’d say, pretending to flip the pages in the air after we’d had something bad happen to us. ‘Bad luck here on page ninety-seven. And on ninety-eight. But something good here on ninety-nine! All you had to do was keep reading!”

— Ally Condie