Crossed (Matched, #2)

by Ally Condie

Because in the end you can’t always choose what to keep. You can only choose how you let it go.

our thoughts are always our own.

If you love someone, if someone loved you, if they taught you to write and made it so you could speak, how can you do nothing at all?

Loving him gave me wings and all my work has given me the strength to move them.

the Society keeps the rest of us from the sight of our own flight.

“You can’t ever really kill a river,” she says. “You can’t kill anything that’s always moving and changing.”

but the wind doesn’t care what we know.

You never know exactly what you’re getting into. What will hold and what will give way.

I don’t fool myself that I hold her together—she does that on her own—but holding her keeps me from flying apart.

It’s beautiful and it’s real, but our time together could be as fleeting as snow on the plateau. We can either try to change everything or just make the most of whatever time we have.

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

Love has different shades.

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

It would never be us, not again. Even if they pulled our bodies from the water and the earth and made us work and walk again, it would never be like the first time. Something would be missing. The Society cannot do this for us. We cannot do this for ourselves. There is something special, irreplaceable, about the first time living.

Love changes what is probable and makes unlikely things possible.

We have all been carved out by our sorrow. Cut deep like canyon walls.

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 it that keeps us moving?

Good-byes are like this. You can’t always mark them well at the moment of separation—no matter how deep they cut.

We have both been wrong; we will both try to make things right. That is all we can do.

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.

people run deep and complicated like rivers, hold their shape and are carved upon like stone.