Top 180 Ally Condie Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “There are some things you only tell a sister. And some things you only ask of a sister.”

— Ally Condie

102. “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

103. “When it rains, I remember.”

— Ally Condie

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

— Ally Condie

105. “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

106. “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

107. “Trust your words.”

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

— 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. “The dead don’t see but I do.”

— Ally Condie

113. “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

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

— Ally Condie

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

— Ally Condie

116. “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

117. “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

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

— Ally Condie

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

— Ally Condie

120. “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

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. “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

123. “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

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

— Ally Condie

125. “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

126. “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

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

— Ally Condie

128. “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

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

— Ally Condie

130. “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

131. “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

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

— Ally Condie

133. “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

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

— Ally Condie

135. “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

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

— Ally Condie

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

— Ally Condie

141. “Are you congratulating me on my life, or on my death?”

— Ally Condie

142. “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

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

— Ally Condie

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

— Ally Condie

145. “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

146. “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

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

— Ally Condie

148. “Knowledge doesn’t fail us.”

— Ally Condie

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

— Ally Condie

150. “I watched Leo and I realized that he also knew how it felt to be different. To want big things in a very small town. To get made fun of. He wasn’t as different as I was. But he also wasn’t one of those lucky people who fit in all the time. And I thought of the first time I worked with him, what I’d seen. He did like the world – that was the thing about him that I liked the best – but the world didn’t always like him back.”

— Ally Condie