That’s how I know they are dreams. Because the simple and plain and everyday things are the ones that we can never have. (Cassia Reyes)
Love changes what is probable and makes unlikely things possible.
And I’ll tell her that I don’t want my life to be samples and scraps. A taste of everything but a meal of nothing.
In the end you can’t always choose what to keep. You can only choose how you let it go.
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.
Lightning. Once it has forked, hot-white, from sky to earth, there is no going back
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.
But then I realize that even if I did have a soul, it’s not as though someone else would be there. It would only be more of me.
…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.
Now that I’ve found the way to fly, which direction should I go into the night?
The only chance of success is to trust in your own power.
Some people think the stars must look closer from up here. They don’t. When you’re up here, you realize how distant they really are—how impossible to reach.
Some people think the stars must look closer from up here. They don’t.When you’re up here, you realize how distant they really are–how impossible to reach.
I wonder if I will ever have the strength to hold onto something. Or if I will always be someone who destroys.
Do not go gentle. So I fight. I fight the only way I know how.
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.
For we are all walking each other to our deaths, and the journey between footsteps makes up our lives
They both have in common their conviction that they are still learning, still growing, when in fact they have long ago lost that ability.
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.
Sometimes you can’t speak, not because others won’t let you, but because you are afraid of what you’ll say.
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.
You always have something left to lose. Until, of course, you die.
It is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures.
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.
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.
We need you.””I’m sorry, but I can’t let that keep me here anymore.
I’ll go over again and again until I’ve finally crossed to where he is
For we are all walking each other to our deaths, and the journey between footsteps makes up our lives.
It’s been so long since I’ve let myself feel anger that I don’t just feel it. It covers my mouth and I swallow it down, the taste sharp and metal as though I’m gnawing through foilware.
But if you were matched,” I say softly, “What do you think she’d be like?””You,” he says, almost before I’ve finished. “You,
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.
Until now, I’ve never been able to see while I fly, and I feel a dizzying lightness as I look out at the land bel
No,’ she says, as if the suggestion is ridiculous. ‘I wouldn’t go back to where I’m from. I’d go someplace I’ve never been.
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
It strikes me that perhaps this is part of what we are fighting to choose. Which pain to feel.
I never needed the Society,” she says, “to Match me.” (-Lei)
It was a little thing, a baby tree, but still it tangled with things around it and required care to move. And when she pulled it out, it’s roots still clung to Earth from it’s old home.
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.
…there’s a difference between knowledge and technology. Knowledge don’t fail us.
For one entire day I let his kiss burn on my cheek and into my blood and I don’t push the memory away… This kiss, these words, they feel like beginning.
If you stay here, you become lost. And no one can find you. I like lost.
I keep telling myself that, and most of the time I believe it.
They could not write their names, but I can write mine, and I will again, somewhere where it will last for a long, long time. I will find Ky, and then I will find that place.
I don’t know what happens after we die. It doesn’t seem to me like there can be much past this. But I suppose I can conceive that what we make and do can last beyond us. Maybe in a different place, on another plane.
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.
I have tried to be righteous all my life. Yet I have never been content.
The Society wants us to be afraid of dying. But I’m not. I’m only afraid of dying wrong.
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.
And it is strange that absence can feel like presence.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I know how it feels when people look right through you, or worse, see you as something or someone other than what you are.
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.
I’m falling in love. I am in love. and it’s not with Xander, though I do love him. I’m sure of that, as sure as I am of the fact what I feel for Ky is something different.
Everyone dies. The don’t all have the chance to see what they wanted most. At least I’ve seen the Above. At least I’ve known True.
So much of life is in the smallness of moments…but they are harder to mark. So we need the grander celebrations and occasions. People like to feel significant
He’s throwing everything he can into the air on the chance that something might take flight. And we’re the smallest, weakest bird.
It could have been different,” I say, almost under my breath. If I’d kissed Indie again after she kissed me. If I hadn’t known Cassia before I met Indie.”But it’s not,” Indie says, and she’s right.
We do not kiss. We do nothing but hold on and breathe, but still I know. I cannot go gently now. Not even for the sake of my parents, my family.Not even for Xander.
Being a teen is past for me. Worrying about the world and my place in it is not.
The beauty of dystopia is that it lets us vicariously experience future worlds – but we still have the power to change our own.