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Summerlost QUOTES

Summerlost QUOTES

1 " My dad used to say that life was like turning the pages in a book. 'Oh, look,' he'd say, pretending to flip the pages in the air after we'd had something bad happen to us. 'Bad luck here on page ninety-seven. And on ninety-eight. But something good here on ninety-nine! All you had to do was keep reading! "

― Ally Condie , Summerlost

2 " I understood why Leo called the fountain Baby Niagara. Because once you see something big, you can't help seeing it in everything small. "

― Ally Condie , Summerlost

3 " You don't have to know someone all the way to miss them. Or to feel bad when they're gone" -Leo "

― Ally Condie , Summerlost

4 " The night was shadows and wind and the smell of a storm on the way, a night for crying until the tears were gone but the ache was left. A night for imagining that you could step out onto the windowsill and say hello to the dark, say I am sad and have the wind say I know. You could say I am alive and the trees would sigh back We are too. You could whisper I am alone and everything ends and the stars in the sky would answer We understand. Or maybe it’s ghosts telling you all these things, saying We know, we’re alone too, we understand how everything and nothing ends. "

― Ally Condie , Summerlost

5 " I have been in the presence of a lot of greatness. And people I love who loved me back. It might be the same thing. "

― Ally Condie , Summerlost

6 " As we came out of the hallway, I pretended that the whole world had secret tunnels, where people could walk straight to wherever they really wanted to be and ignore all the meanness in the middle. "

― Ally Condie , Summerlost

7 " I couldn’t tell anyone.
I never, ever wanted Ben to be dead.
But sometimes I wanted him gone.
And then he was. "

― Ally Condie , Summerlost

8 " She was in the right place at the right time last night, safe inside when the tree came down.
One thing different—an extra piece of sandpaper outside when she needed it, the tree falling a bit sooner—and she would be gone. One thing different—hitting a red light instead of a green one on the way to the freeway, choosing another errand to run that day—and my dad and Ben would still be here.
It’s not right that something so big, your entire life, depends on a million tiny things. "

― Ally Condie , Summerlost

9 " I am different and that has nothing to do with you, I wanted to tell him. Leo is different and that has nothing to do with you. You look at us and you don’t like us and you don’t even know why. I’ve seen it before a million times with Ben. "

― Ally Condie , Summerlost

10 " Leo didn’t laugh.
He also didn’t cry. Which it looked for a minute like he might do. I knew that feeling. Hold your mouth tight, tell your heart not to hurt, tell your brain not to think about what might happen next. "

― Ally Condie , Summerlost

11 " I admitted it to myself.
I had all kinds of dreams. I wanted to go skiing again and get fast and good. I wanted to go to London too someday. I wanted to fall in love.i wanted to own a bookstore or a restraunt and have people come in and say, "Hi, Cedar," and I wanted from ride a bike down the streets in a little town in a country where people spoke a different language. Maybe my bike would a basket and maybe the basket would have flowers in it. I wanted to live in a big city and wear lipstick and my hair in bun and buy groceries and carry them home in a paper bag. My high heels would click when I climbed the stairs to my apartment. I wanted to stand at the edge of a lake and listen. "

― Ally Condie , Summerlost

12 " This summer I’d been spending a lot of time on other people’s deaths. Harley’s. Lisette’s. But somehow it had helped me feel alive. Because they weren’t my deaths. The ones that were my own were too hard to face. "

― Ally Condie , Summerlost

13 " A minute ago you told me that you thought I was cute.”
“Yeah,” Leo said. “I mean, I do think that. But you’re not my girlfriend. You’re my person.”
I knew right away what he meant.
I thought he was cute and he thought I was cute but it was different than it was when people have crushes.
With Leo I’d fallen into another kind of like. I couldn’t wait to tell him stuff and I loved hearing him laugh at my jokes and I loved laughing at his jokes. He made me feel like I had a spot in the world.
It felt as if Leo and I could like each other all our lives.
So I hugged him.
He was my person too. "

― Ally Condie , Summerlost

14 " My dad used to say that life was like turning the pages in a book. "Oh, look," he'd say, pretending to flip the pages in the air after we'd had something bad happen to us. "Bad luck here on page ninety-seven. And on ninety-eight. But something good here on ninety-nine! All you had to do was keep reading! "

― Ally Condie , Summerlost

15 " The end is what people talk about. How they died.
Why does the end always have to be what people talk about? Think about?
Because it’s the last thing we knew of you. And it breaks our hearts because we can picture it. We don’t want to, and we know we might get it wrong, but we do. We can’t stop. Those last moments keep coming to our minds, awake, asleep.
At the end, everyone is alone.
You were alone.
But other times you were not.
You clomped around onstage, your face red with embarrassment, your knees knobby in your cargo shorts, and you looked back at your wife and kids who laughed and cheered.
You rolled down a hill. You had been crying but now you smiled. There was grass on the back of your shirt and in your hair and your eyes were bright. I put my arms around you.
Your last moment was the worst moment, but you had other moments.
And people were with you for some of them.
I was with you for some of them.
There were times when we were all, all around you. "

― Ally Condie , Summerlost

16 " And I guess that was right, but it also seemed to me like people who said Ben was special and had no worries were as wrong as the people long ago, but in a different way.
Because that’s crappy. What if this life was all Ben got? People said he was sweet and special—and he was—but he was also sad and angry. More than most people. He cried. His own body seemed to feel weird to him sometimes—he would jump and move like he wanted to be free of his skin. I could see him looking at us like Get me out of here and we were never sure where to take him. You can’t take someone away from their own body. And that seemed unfair. Would God really do that to someone so other people could feel like they were learning important lessons in the few minutes they spent with him? "

― Ally Condie , Summerlost

17 " ...once you see something big, you can't help seeing it in everything small "

― Ally Condie , Summerlost

18 " For a minute I thought he was going to turn around and leave. Not even watch Times of Our Seasons. Then I saw him take a deep breath and do that thing. You see grown-ups do it all the time. They’re about to lose their patience or get mad and then instead they take a deep breath and do not lose their patience and do not scream.
It’s a weird thing to see a little kid do. I used to see Ben do it and it tore me up. "

― Ally Condie , Summerlost

19 " I didn’t point out that I’m part Chinese-American and so the odds that I would have been in England back in Shakespeare’s time were highly unlikely. “And, "

― Ally Condie , Summerlost

20 " But he knew I wouldn't do that. He knew I wouldn't ask Mom for anything I didn't really, really need. We both tried to be good for her and she tried to be patient with us. Sometimes I thought of the three of us as pencils with the erasers scrubbed down to the end, and the next swipe across the paper would tear through the page and make a scree sound across the desk. "

― Ally Condie , Summerlost