Top 180 Ally Condie Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 3 of 4

101. “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

102. “I couldn’t find a way to fly to you so I walked every step in this stone.”

— Ally Condie

103. “All the studies show that the best age to die is eighty. It’s long enough that we can have a complete life experience, but not so long that we feel useless.”

— Ally Condie

104. “When it rains, I remember.”

— Ally Condie

105. “They say you should always teach a person’s name first. That way, even if they never learn to write anything else, they’ll always have something.”

— Ally Condie

106. “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

107. “People fall in love’, I say, my voice hoarse. ‘It happens.”

— Ally Condie

108. “Our time together feels like a storm, like wild wind and rain, like something too big to handle but too powerful to escape. It blows around me and tangles my hair, leaves water on my face, makes me know that I am alive, alive, alive. There are moments of calm and pause as there are in every storm, and moments when our words fork lightening, at least for each other.”

— Ally Condie

109. “And it is strange that absence can feel like presence. A missing so complete that if it were to go away, I would turn around, stunned, to see that the room is empty after all, when before it at least had something, if not him.”

— Ally Condie

110. “The dead don’t see but I do.”

— Ally Condie

111. “I understood why Leo called the fountain Baby Niagara. Because once you see something big, you can’t help seeing it in everything small.”

— Ally Condie

112. “And when I see Ky again, which I know will happen, I will whisper the words I have written in his ear, against his lips. And they will change from ash and nothing into flesh and blood.”

— Ally Condie

113. “That part was easy. Tearing up the roots will be the hard part.”

— Ally Condie

114. “Trust your words.”

— Ally Condie

115. “I don’t cut deep-I don’t want to kill the tree. I carve her name carefully on the trunk, thinking, as I always do, of when I held her hand in mine to teach her to write.”

— Ally Condie

116. “Sometimes it seems like everything I’ve done has been to help you be ready for someone else.”

— Ally Condie

117. “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 – why he walks like this, why he closes his eyes like that – you can love those parts, too, and it’s a love at once more complicated and more complete.”

— Ally Condie

118. “As we came out of the hallway, I pretended that the whole world had secret tunnels, where people could walk straight to wherever they really wanted to be and ignore all the meanness in the middle.”

— Ally Condie

119. “And out of nowhere, I think: So this is how it feels to stand at the edge of a canyon.”

— Ally Condie

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

— Ally Condie

121. “Sometimes you can’t speak, not because others won’t let you, but because you are afraid of what you’ll say.”

— Ally Condie

122. “Nothing is really lost as long as you remember it.”

— Ally Condie

123. “I lift the tablet to my mouth. And then I hear a voice from a place deep in my memory. You are strong enough to go without. Fine, Grandfather, I think to myself. I will be strong enough to go without the tablet. But there are other things I’m not strong enough to go without, and I intend to fight for them.”

— Ally Condie

124. “You don’t know me,” she says. “Yes, I do,” I say.”

— Ally Condie

125. “Ky smiles then, a smile I’ve never seen before. It’s the kind of daring, reckless smile that could make people follow him straight into a firing, a flood.”

— Ally Condie

126. “I think of how many invisible injuries are possible. Ones scored on your heart, your brain, your bones. How do we all stand? I wonder. What is is that keeps us moving?”

— Ally Condie

127. “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

128. “I believe, sometimes in spite of myself, in grace and better things to come and a time when we will all be whole.”

— Ally Condie

129. “I believe in a new beginning. And so do many others out there – those writing on scraps to hang in the Gallery, those who continue to work hard to take care of the sick, those who dare to believe that we can all be the pilots of something new and better.”

— Ally Condie

130. “The lesson was a good one to learn. Do not pretend one place is like another or look for similarities. Only look for what is.”

— Ally Condie

131. “I’m not an animal. And I’m not your weapon. I’m not your anything.”

— Ally Condie

132. “Ky’s story, bit by bit, is turning to ash and nothing. Except. He remembers it, and now I do, too.”

— Ally Condie

133. “I don’t trust the Society, and I don’t trust the rebelions, I don’t choose either of them, I’ve seen what both can do.”

— Ally Condie

134. “That’s when I realize that the statistics the Officials give us do not matter to me. I know there are many people who are happy and I am glad for them. But this is Ky. If he is the one person who falls by the wayside while the other ninety-nine are happy and fulfilled, that is not right with me anymore. I realize that I don’t care about the Officer pacing below or the other hikers among the trees, or really anything else at all, and that is when I realize how dangerous this truly is.”

— Ally Condie

135. “In a story, you can turn to the front and being again and everyone lives once more.”

— Ally Condie

136. “If I couldn’t name it, would I even know what it is? Would I even feel it at all?”

— Ally Condie

137. “You are strong enough to go without.”

— Ally Condie

138. “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

139. “But then I feel it. Even hidden away in the dark, I can tell that it is there. Some small part of me is always, always free.”

— Ally Condie

140. “You don’t have to know someone all the way to miss them. Or to feel bad when they’re gone” -Leo.”

— Ally Condie

141. “You always have something left to lose. Until, of course, you die.”

— Ally Condie

142. “And I do not know how I can feel this much pain and survive, and at the same time know how much I have to live.”

— Ally Condie

143. “There have been Plagues all through history and that won’t end with this one.′ ‘So we’re never really safe,’ I say. ‘Oh no, my boy,’ Oker says, almost gently. ‘That might be the Society’s greatest triumph – that so many of us ever believed that we were.”

— Ally Condie

144. “So much of life is in the smallness of life. 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

145. “The way the two of them look at each other is like touching.”

— Ally Condie

146. “She’s not the kind of person to watch someone else build a boat and set sail without her.”

— Ally Condie

147. “This is the difference between us. I live to sort, he knows how to create.”

— Ally Condie

148. “Knowledge doesn’t fail us.”

— Ally Condie

149. “She’s right. We would compose poems about love and tell stories that have been heard in some form before. But it would be our first time feeling and telling.”

— Ally Condie

150. “Water’s always moving. It’s never the same.”

— Ally Condie