Crossed (Matched, #2)

by Ally Condie

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

“For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crossed the bar.”

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

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

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

I wish I could rewrite this map. It would be much easier to mark how I want the world to be, instead of trying to figure out how it really is.

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

One seems to reach up to the sky. I look at the figure for a long time, at that reaching hand, and remember the last time I saw Cassia.

“You’re here,” he says, breathing hard and hungry. Sweat and dirt cover his face, and he looks at me as though I’m the only thing he ever needed to see. I open my mouth to say yes. But I only have time to breathe in before he closes the last of the distance. All I know is the kiss.

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

I lean closer to her and this time I can speak. I whisper, though part of me wants to shout. “Do not go gentle.” “No,” she agrees, her voice, her skin soft in that good night. And then she kisses me hard.

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

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

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

How can he both draw me in and keep me out?

I am tired of chasing him through canyons and out onto plains and stretching out my hand only to have him take it some times and not others.

Love changes what is probable and makes unlikely things possible.

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

How much do we have to show the people we love?

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

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.