The first of many, many updates to come ... Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
"Strays and wanderers are often sent by the gods."
-from Rick Riordan's dedication at the beginning of Mark of Athena (Heroes of Olympus #3)
"Good luck is a sham. The wheel of fortune is a Ponzi scheme. True success requires sacrifice.
-Mark of Athena (Heroes of Olympus #3) by Rick Riordan
"But she wondered why beautiful things had to be wrapped up with evil history? Or was it the other way around? Maybe the evil history made it necessary to build beautiful things, to mask the darker aspects."
-Mark of Athena (Heroes of Olympus #3) by Rick Riordan
"You were ready to jump. ... You just weren't sure of it yet."
-from Matched (Matched Trilogy #1) by Ally Condie
"The two of us hold each other's gazes for a long, unembarrassed moment ... I'm not sure what he knows -- whether he knows me, or just something about me."
-from Matched (Matched Trilogy #1) by Ally Condie
"I've realized one thing, though. Even though I've done the right thing -- burned the words and tried to forget them -- it doesn't work. These words don't go away."
-from Matched (Matched Trilogy #1) by Ally Condie
"Outside the door, Xander waits for me. It strikes me that this symbolizes what is wrong here. No one can ever really come in, and when it's time to let them, we don't know how."
-from Matched (Matched Trilogy #1) by Ally Condie
"Maybe it's even more simple than that. Maybe he never wants to touch me. Perhaps ... I am only a friend. A friend who finally wants to know his story, nothing more. And at first, that's who I was. I wanted to know more about this boy who lives among us, but who never truly speaks. More about what happened before. ... But now I feel like finding out about him is one of the ways I find out about myself. I did not expect to love his words. I did not expect to find myself in them. Is falling in love with someone's story the same thing as falling in love with the person himself?"
-from Matched (Matched Trilogy #1) by Ally Condie
"This way you can look at it one last time. It's never really lost to you as long as you remember it."
-from Matched (Matched Trilogy #1) by Ally Condie
"I only mean to tell him a few more lines, but once I start telling him it's hard to hold back, and I say the whole thing. The words go together. Some things are created to be together."
-from Matched (Matched Trilogy #1) by Ally Condie
"I feel as if the two of us are our true selves when we hike in the trees on the hills. When we're with everyone else on Saturday nights, though, it becomes difficult. We go through a forest that is complicated and full of tangles and there are no stone cairns to guide us except the ones we build ourselves."
-from Matched (Matched Trilogy #1) by Ally Condie
"Let me believe in this, all of this, and you believe it, too."
-from Matched (Matched Trilogy #1) by Ally Condie
"That's how I know they are dreams. Because the simple and plain and everyday things are the ones that we can never have."
-from Matched (Matched Trilogy #1) by Ally Condie
"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 lightning, at least for each other."
-from Matched (Matched Trilogy #1) by Ally Condie
"I believe in you ... That's more faith than I ever thought I'd have."
-from Matched (Matched Trilogy #1) by Ally Condie
"And then he says it, right out there on the Hill, and of all the words I have hidden and saved and treasured, these are the ones I will never forget, the most important ones of all. 'I love you.' Lightning. Once it has forked, hot-white, from sky to earth, there is no going back."
-from Matched (Matched Trilogy #1) by Ally Condie
"I didn't see him differently because I saw his face on the portscreen ... I saw him differently because I saw him outside, unguarded for a moment. ... I saw him seeing me."
-from Matched (Matched Trilogy #1) by Ally Condie
"The darkness behind doesn't worry me; neither do the stars ahead. I think of how perhaps the best way to fly would be with hands full of earth so you always remember where you came from, how hard walking could sometimes be."
-from Matched (Matched Trilogy #1) by Ally Condie
"I couldn't find a way to fly to you so I walked every step on this stone."
-from Crossed (Matched Trilogy #2) by Ally Condie
I climb into the dark for you
Are you waiting in the stars for me?
-from Crossed (Matched Trilogy #2) by Ally Condie
"Love changes what is probable and makes unlikely things possible."
-from Crossed (Matched Trilogy #2) by Ally Condie
"How much do we have to show the people we love? What pieces of my life do I have to lay bare, carve out, and put before her? Is it enough that I have pointed the way to who I am?"
-from Crossed (Matched Trilogy #2) by Ally Condie
"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?"
-from Crossed (Matched Trilogy #2) by Ally Condie
"Everyone has something of beauty about them. In the beginning for me, it was [his] eyes I noticed, and I love them still. But loving lets you look, and look, and look again. You notice the back of a hand, the turn of a hand, 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 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."
-from Crossed (Matched Trilogy #2) by Ally Condie
"They've matched me with the one person in camp I care about. Which goes to show that caring about anyone leaves you vulnerable, but I still can't stop."
-from Reached (Matched Trilogy #3) by Ally Condie
"I promised that I wouldn't let fear make me into someone I didn't want to be. Now I'm someone who can trust and be trusted."
-from Reached (Matched Trilogy #3) by Ally Condie
"Everyone has a currency ... One of the most interesting ones is knowledge, when people want to know things, not possess them. Of course, what people want to know is a similarly varied and intricate business."
-from Reached (Matched Trilogy #3) by Ally Condie
"You cannot change your journey if you are unwilling to move at all."
-from Reached (Matched Trilogy #3) by Ally Condie
"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."
-from Reached (Matched Trilogy #3) by Ally Condie
"I believe this. That every person might have a way to fly, a line of poetry to put down for others to see, a hand to heal."
-from Reached (Matched Trilogy #3) by Ally Condie
"Even though Xander is gone, even though all cannot be as everyone would wish, there is satisfaction in knowing that something good and right and true was a 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."
-from Reached (Matched Trilogy #3) by Ally Condie
"I suppose there is no way of truly knowing one's heart until one is put to the test."
-from Sweet Evil (Sweet Trilogy #1) by Wendy Higgins
"Because in the end you can't always choose what to keep. You can only choose how you let it go."
-from Matched (Matched Trilogy #1) by Ally Condie
