Reached Quotes

“You cannot change your journey if you are unwilling to move at all.”
― Ally Condie, Reached

“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.”
― Ally Condie, Reached

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

“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, Reached

“Words mean what you want them to mean.”
― Ally Condie, Reached

“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, Reached

“There is ebb and flow. Leaving and coming. Flight and fall. Sing and silent. Reaching and reached.”
― Ally Condie, Reached

“I remember what Anna called the three of us.
The Pilot. The Poet. The Physic.
They are in all of us. I believe this. They every person might have a way to fly, a line of poetry to put down for others to see, a hand to heal.”
― ally condie, Reached

“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, Reached

“When we fall in love the first time, we don’t know anything. We risk a lot less than we do if we choose to love again. (Xander)”
― Ally Condie, Reached

“It's nice, isn't it... to be part of something greater than yourself.”
― Ally Condie, Reached

“I know you love me. I love you, I always will, but things can't hold like this. They have to break. You say you don't mind, that you will wait for me, but I think that you do mind, and you should. Because we've done too much waiting in our lives, Xander. Don't wait for me anymore. I hope for love for you.

I hope for this more than anything else, maybe even more than my own happiness. And in a way, perhaps that means I love Xander best of all.”
― Ally Condie, Reached

“I know how it feels when people look right through you, or worse, see you as something or someone other than what you are.”
― Ally Condie, Reached

“Which goes to show that caring about anyone leaves you vulnerable.”
― Ally Condie, Reached

“Some people think the stars must look closer from up here. They don't. When you're up here, you realize how distant they really are—how impossible to reach.”
― Ally Condie, Reached

“Do you think you could let someone go if you thought it was best for them?”
― Ally Condie, Reached

“Sometimes paper is just paper, words are just words. Ways to capture the real thing. Don't be afraid to remember that.”
― Ally Condie, Reached

“Of course, one person can be the world.”
― Ally Condie, Reached

“There is satisfaction in knowing that something good and right and true was part of you. That you had the blessing, gift, good fortune, perfect luck, to know someone like this, to pass through fire and water and stone and sky together and emerge, all of you, strong enough to hold on, strong enough to let go. (Cassia)”
― Ally Condie, Reached

“Things happen whether you deserve them or not”
― Ally Condie, Reached

“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, Reached

“When you can’t cry because all you are is pain, and if you let some of it out, you might cease to exist.”
― Ally Condie, Reached

“The earth reflects the sky and the sky meets the earth and, every now and then, if we’re
lucky, we have a moment to see how small we are.”
― Ally Condie, Reached

“Newrose, Oldrose, Quean Anne's lace.
Water, river, stone and sun

Wind over hill, under tree.
Past the border none can see.

Climbing into dark for you,
Will you climb in stars for me?

P.124”
― Ally Condie, Reached

“For a moment, I’m a part of it all. Then I’m just apart.”
― Ally Condie, Reached

“It's not all gone. She loved someone before and so did I. The Society and the Rising and the world are all still out there, pressing against us. But Lei holds them away. She's made enough space for two people to stand up together, whether or not any Society or Rising says that they can. She's done it before. The amazing thing is that she's not afraid to do it again. When we fall in love the first time, we don't know anything. We risk a lot less than we do if we choose to love again.

There is something extraordinary about the first time falling.
But if feels even better to find myself standing on solid ground, with someone holding on to me, pulling me back, and know that I'm doing the same for her.”
― Ally Condie, Reached

“You don’t usually get to choose the measure of suffering or the degree of joy you have. (Ky Markham)”
― Ally Condie, Reached

“It’s all right to wonder”
― Ally Condie, Reached

“Inside me are the real things that give me strength—my thoughts, the small stones of my own choosing. They tumble in my mind, some polished from frequent turning, some new and rough, some that cut.”
― Ally Condie, Reached