Crossed (Matched, #2)

by Ally Condie

The dead don’t see but I do. I see too many things. I always have. Words and pictures connect together in my mind in strange ways and I notice details wherever I am.

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.

It’s looking at something without being watched, without being told how to see. That’s what the picture has given us.

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

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? You might as well take their words out of the dirt and try to snatch them from the wind.

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.”

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.

She always found the one good part of everything and then turned her face toward it every chance she had.

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

the music ended but we were still singing

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