"Everyone has something of beauty about them. 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 why's, you can love those parts too, and it's a love at once more complicated and more complete."

"The beauty of dystopia is that it lets us vicariously experience future worlds - but we still have the power to change our own."

"I'll go over again and again until I've finally crossed to where he is."

"I do not know how I can feel this much pain and survive, and at the same time know how much I have to live."

"There's a difference between knowledge and technology. Knowledge don't fail us."

"Do not go gentle. So I fight. I fight the only way I know how."

"The Society wants us to be afraid of dying. But I'm not. I'm only afraid of dying wrong."

"I could write paper people and I would love them too, I could make them almost real."

"The only chance of success is to trust in your own power."

"I want to reach out and grab his hand and hold it to me, right over my heart, right where it aches the most. I don't know if doing that would heal me or make my heart break entirely, but either way this constant hungry waiting would be over."

"Ky still looks at me and I wonder for a moment if he is going to ask me what I am thinking about. But of course, he doesn't. He doesn't learn things by asking questions... He learns by watching."

"Nothing is really lost as long as you remember it."

"I keep telling myself that, and most of the time I believe it."

"The pain wants to eat me away. I wish I could have one without the other, but that's the problem with being alive. You don't usually get to choose the measure of suffering or the degree of joy you have."

"It is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures."

"Because I feel no anger toward my mother. Only loss, and loss is a feeling you can't fight your way out of as easily."

"Sometimes paper is only paper,' my mothers says. 'Words are just words. Ways to capture the real thing. Don't be afraid to remember that.'I know what she means. 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."

"Is falling in love with someone's story the same thing as falling in love with the person himself?"

"People can be miracles."

"Lightning. Once it has forked, hot-white, from sky to earth, there is no going back."

"He's throwing everything he can into the air on the chance that something might take flight. And we're the smallest, weakest bird."

"I have tried to be righteous all my life. Yet I have never been content."

"She's right. We would compose poems about love and tell stories that have been heard in some form before. But it would be our first time feeling and telling."

"We need you.'I'm sorry, but I can't let that keep me here anymore."

"For we are all walking each other to our deaths, and the journey between footsteps makes up our lives."

"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."

"I draw in a ragged breath, the kind you take when the pain is too deep to cry, when you can't cry because all you are is pain, and if you let some of it out, you might cease to exist."

"So I fight. I fight the only way I know, with thinking of Ky, even thought the pain of missing him is so strong I can hardly stand it... I think of him, I think of him, I think of him."

"They both have in common their conviction that they are still learning, still growing, when in fact they have long ago lost that ability."

"The rain turns lighter, turns to snow. And I have a sense that we have not yet arrived, that we are still reaching. For each other. For who we are meant to be."

"Being a teen is past for me. Worrying about the world and my place in it is not."

"It dances on the air for a moment before it falls, too. A fresh gust of wind almost saves it, but a worker catches sight of it and lifts a tube up to suck the paper from the air, to suck the words from the sky.I'm sorry, Grandfather."

"My mother looks at me with love and understanding, and I realize: she knows what my father did. She knows what I want. She knows and even though she would not destroy a tissue sample or love someone who is not her Match, she still loves us, even though we have done those things."

"There is so much want. I feel it so much that I am water, a river of want, pooled in the shape of a girl named Cassia."

"They were too much to carryso i left them behindfor a new life, in a new placebut no one forgot who i wasi didn'tand neither did the people who watchthey watched for yearsthey watch now."

"I love you.'lightning. Once it has forked, hot-white, from sky to earth, there is no going back.It's time. I feel it, I know it. My eyes on him, his on me, and both of us breathing, watching, tired of of waiting. Ky close his eyes, but mine are still open. what will it feel like, his lips on mine? Like a secret told, a promise kept? Like that line in the poem-a shower of all my days- silvery rain falling all around me, where the lighting meets the earth? The whistle blows below us and the moment breaks. We are safe.For now."

"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."

"Once you want something, everything changes. Now I want everything. I feel it so much that I am water, a river of want,pooled in the shape of a girl."

"If you stay here, you become lost. And no one can find you. I like lost."

"Do not go gentle into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light."

"He watches the sun out of the world and the stars into it and sometimes I wonder if he watches the sun come up again. Is it hard to sleep when you know you are almost at the end? Do you not want to miss a moment, even those that would otherwise seem dull and unremarkable?"

"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."

"I wonder if I will ever have the strength to hold onto something. Or if I will always be someone who destroys."

"I can trust in my parents' love. And it strikes me that is a big thing to trust, a big thing to have had, no matter what else happens."

"Ever since the day of the mistake with my Match. I've never known which life is my true one. Even with the reassurances of the Offical that day in the greenspace, I think a part of me hasn't felt at peace. It was as though I saw for the first time that life could branch into different paths, take different directions."

"Growing apart doesn't change the fact that for a long time we grew side by side, our roots will always be tangled. I'm glad for that."

"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."

"Inside me are the real things that give me strength-my thoughts, the small stones of my own choosing. They tumble in my mind, some polished from frequent turning, some new and rough, some that cut."

"You always have something left to lose. Until, of course, you die."

"Any other questions?'Just one,' I say. 'What color are your eyes?' I want to know what he thinks, how he sees himself - the real Ky - when he dares to look.'Blue,' he says sounding surprised, 'they've always been blue.'Not to me.'What do they look like to you?' he says puzzled, amused. Not looking at my mouth anymore, looking into my eyes.'Lots of colors,' I say. 'At first I thought they were brown. Once I thought they were green...'What are they now?' he asks. He widens his eyes a little, leans closer, lets me look as long and deep as I want.'Well?'Everything,' I tell him, 'They're everything."