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"Did you know Grandfather would give the poems to me? I ask.'We thought he might, my mother says.'Why didn't you stop him?'We didn't want to take away your choices, my mother says.'But Grandfather never did tell me about the Rising, I say.'I think he wanted you to find your own way, my mother says. She smiles. 'In that way, he was a true rebel. I think that's why he chose that argument with your father as his favorite memory. Though he was upset when the fight happened, later he came to see that your father was strong in choosing his own path, and he admired him for it."
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"In our age it is not sex that raises its ugly head, but love."

"It seems my heart is made of tissue paper, I wish the world would handle it more delicately."

"I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It's hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic. I will try. All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want. Let's leave it like that. That block has always been there and always will be, and my chance of getting, or achieving, anything that I long for will always be gravely reduced by the interminable existence of that block."

"I'm not sure. But there's something about the darkness, the stillness of this hour, I think, that creates a language of its own. There's a strange kind of freedom in the dark; a terrifying vulnerability we allow ourselves at exactly the wrong moment, tricked by the darkness into thinking it will keep our secrets. We forget that the blackness is not a blanket; we forget that the sun will soon rise. But in the moment, at least, we feel brave enough to say things we'd never say in the light."

"I found that the same softness which once made me a target now compelled people to trust me with their stories."

"Turns out rolling your eyes in a bar when 'Land Down Under' plays is like someone belching during the Star Spangled Banner in America."

"Despite the way she rallied, the haunted look in her eyes was enough to break him, as lost and lonely as an abandoned child's."

"I always thought of men as being hard-maybe because I was hard. But there was a softness in Tom that betrayed his large masculine hands and his deep baritone voice. He knew something about love that I didn't. I don't know where he'd learned it, but it wasn't something you got from a book, not something you could learn in an online class, not something you could borrow. Maybe it was something you were born with. Some people knew how to love and some people didn't. Tom was the former. I was the latter. I didn't know which one of us had it worse."

"Vulnerability creates unimaginable space to build each other up, as much as it creates ample room to tear each other down."

"The sensitive artist knows that a bitter wind is blowing."
Explore more quotes by Ally Condie

"Sometimes you can't speak, not because others won't let you, but because you are afraid of what you'll say."

"This is a difficult balance, telling the truth: how much to share, how much to keep, which truths will wound but not ruin, which will cut too deep to heal."

"I know how it feels when people look right through you, or worse, see you as something or someone other than what you are."

"All of the things that were shown in early studies to be good for longevity-happy marriages, healthy bodies-are ours to have. We live long,good lives. We die on our eightieth birthdays, surrounded by our families, before dementia sets in. Cancer, heart disease, and most debilitatingillnesses are almost entirely eradicated. This is as close to perfect as any society has ever managed to get."

"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."

"At first, that's who I was. I wanted to know more about this boy who lives among us, but who never truly speaks... But now I feel like finding out about him is one of the ways I found out about myself. I did not expect to love his words. I did no expect to find myself in the."

"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."

"He's in pain. I am, too. It strikes me that perhaps this is part of what we are fighting to choose. Which pain we feel."

"At first when the rain fell from the sky so wide and deepit smelled like sage, my favorite smellI went up on the plateau to watch it cometo see the gifts it always broughtbut this rain changed from blue to black and leftnothing."
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