Hope for the Hopeless

Lovelies, 

I started this blog with a heavy emphasis on the power of words, of quotes, to explain our feelings and say the words that express the feelings we often are too overwhelmed by emotion to find. The inspiration that comes from reading a particular quote that matches exactly what you are going through and says what you cannot, is an experience unlike any other. It's comforting to know you are not alone. We all have stories, problems, and dreams and everyone of you is important. There is hope out there, miracles occur in the face of impossibility and improbability, and when your time is right, once upon a time, we find magic in the form of love that defies everything.

That being said, I think it's quote time :)
<3 C

"Peace of mind is something I'll never find. It's something I'll never know until I find you. I'm out of time, blame it on the doubts of mine. Blame it on the thoughts I refuse to face. A love lost wasn't love. Quit blaming yourself. I get lost in the words we choose to say. We get lost inside of ourselves but found in someone else."

-Jacob Gann

"A deep understanding runs through us even in the midst of misunderstanding."

-Cassia Reyes, Matched

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

-Cassia, Matched

"Let me believe in this, all of this, and you believe in it, too."

-Ky Markham, Matched

"Now I live in his story. Now I am a part of his, and he of mine, and the part we write together sometimes feels like the only part that matters."

-Cassia, Matched

"I believe in you. That's more faith that I ever thought I'd have."

-Ky, Matched

"The chance to glimpse what was lost distracted me from what must be found."

-Cassia, Matched

"You don't play with other people's lives."

-Ky, Matched

"Sometimes it feels like everything I've done has been to help you be ready for someone else."

-Xander Carrow, Matched

"Because in the end you can't always choose what to keep. You can only choose how you let it go."

-Ky Markham, Crossed

"Do you know what it's like for someone to choose to leave you?"

-Xander Carrow, Crossed

"Much as I love looking at the stars, I never learned to guide by them. I mark my course by people."

-Cassia Reyes, Crossed

"I climb into the dark for you

Are you waiting in the stars for me?"
-Cassia, Crossed

"Her beauty always makes me ache."

-Ky, Crossed

"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?"

-Cassia, Crossed

"I know what it's like to miss someone. I know what it's like to miss the past, to wish you could go back in time. But you need to realize that you can't. You can't miss it anymore, because you can't go back. You need to stop building the memories up in your head, and see them for what the really were. A few great days surrounded by a lot of terrible ones. And you need to realize that you deserve someone who makes everyday great."

"I could build a dream that we won't ever wanna wake up from."

-Kris Allen

"The light of love flows out of our soul, but often it's blocked by our fear to show it."

-Paulo Coehlo

"I find myself thinking more about the people I've never met, rather than the people I see on a daily basis."

"Life is impossible. And miraculous."

-Caterina Scorsone

"We create our own destiny."
-Alex Karev

"Your life is a gift, accept it, no matter how screwed up or painful it seems to be. Somethings are going to work out as if they were destined to happen. As if they were just meant to be."

-Meredith Grey Webber

"Understand that the past cannot and will not take you down. If it didn't then, it certainly can't now."

-Maggie Lyon

"I vow to always hold you with tenderness and to have the patience that love demands."

-The Vow

"You can't give up on the things you love. Not ever."

-Charlotte King

"Astronomers have attempted to count the number of stars in the universe. One group of scientists estimates that the number of stars within range of our telescopes is 10 times greater than all the grains of sand on the world's beaches and deserts. That is a paradox of man:compared to God, man is nothing:yet we are everything to God.

God knows that some of the greatest souls who have ever lived are those who will never appear in the chronicles of history. They are the blessed, humble souls who emulate the Savior's example and spend the days of their lives doing good."

-Dieter F. Uchtdorf

"In the family relationship love is really spelled t-i-m-e."

-Dieter F. Uchtdorf

"My strength as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure."

-Alfred Lord Tennyson

"It's the possibility that keeps me going, not the guarantee, and though you may call me a dreamer or fool or any other thing, I believe that anything is possible."

Noah Calhoun, The Notebook

"Miracles, no matter how inexplicable or unbelievable, are real and can occur without regard to the natural order of things."

-Noah, The Notebook

"It had changed him forever. Perfect love did that to a person."

-Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook

"A 'living poem' had always been the words that came to mind when he tried to describe her to others."

"Poetry wasn't written to be analyzed; it was meant to inspire without reason, to touch without understanding."

-Allie, The Notebook

"Everyday we are together is the greatest day of my life. I will always be yours."

-Noah, The Notebook

"Everything good happens after 2am."

-Brie

"Forever is composed of nows."

"I had to know he existed, that was all. Everything else I could endure. So long as he existed."

"What a wonderful thought it is that some of the best days of our lives haven't happened yet."

"I had never done anything that took my own breath away, and I suppose now that was part of the problem--my chronic inability to astonish myself. I promise you, no one judges me more harshly than I do myself."

"Promises are like the full moon. If they are not kept at once, they diminish day by day."

-German proverb

"Time passes quickly. We cannot call back time that is past, we cannot stop time that now is, and we cannot experience the future in our present state. Time is a gift, a treasure not to be put aside for the future but to be used wisely in the present."

-Thomas S. Monson

"We are unaware of hosts of blessings that we receive from day to day."

-Quentin L. Cook

"There is no chance, no fate, no destiny that can circumvent or hinder of control the firm resolve of a determined soul."
-Marion D. Hanks

"Thee lift me and I'll lift thee, and we will ascend together."

-Proverb

"We can't predict all the struggles and storms in life, not even the ones just around the next corner, but as persons of faith and hope, we know beyond the shadow of any doubt that the gospel of Jesus Christ is true and the best is yet to come."

-L. Tom Perry

"I am only a blurry, in-between face, easy to forget. Not pretty. Not ugly, either. Just plain, like a thousand other faces you would see on the street."

-Lena, Delirium

"You have to go forward no matter what happens."

-Lena, Delirium

"Love: It will kill you and save you, both."

-Lena, Delirium

"I vowed after that day that I would be your hero too, no matter how long it took."

-Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver

"So many things become beautiful when you really look."

-Sam, Before I Fall

"Everyone can be fixed."

-Sam, Before I Fall

"I marvel at how even the wrong choices can keep us on the right path. How the worst mistake can wind up being the best thing that ever happened to us. Even if you chose a fairly rocky journey, everything seemed to come full circle to bring you back to this one, perfect moment: exactly where you're meant to be."

-Jaden, Cross My Heart

"When you love someone you love them. And every day you sit back pretending that you don't is one less day you have with them."

-Phillip, Cross My Heart

"Shouldn't you be with your friends, staring at yourselves in the mirror?"

-Veronica "Ronnie" Miller, The Last Song

"Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

-Anna Karenina

"This is who I am, and this is what I enjoy, and of all the people I know right now, I want to enjoy this experience with you."
-Will Blakelee, The Last Song

"There are guys who grow up thinking they'll settle down some distant time in the future, and there are guys who are ready for marriage as soon as they meet the right person: The former bore me, mainly because they're pathetic; and the latter, quite frankly, are hard to find. But it's the serious ones I'm interested in, and it takes time to find a guy like that whom I'm equally interested in. I mean, if the relationship can't survive the long term, why on earth would it be worth my time and energy for the short term?"

-Megan Blakelee, The Last Song

"IMTF=In My Thoughts Forever."

-Will, The Last Song

"In the end, you should always do the right thing even if it's hard."

-Ronnie, The Last Song

"It was incredible to think that after weeks of absolutely nothing happening, everything she'd been waiting for would be over in a matter of minutes."

-Ronnie

"It's not like it changes anything, but everything has changed."

-Ronnie

"In hindsight, the pieces all fit together. Yet everything was falling apart."

-Ronnie

"Nothing is more fulfilling than love itself."

-Steve Miller, The Last Song

"I have faith that God will show you the answer. But you have to understand that sometimes it takes a while to be able to recognize what God wants you to do. That's how it often is. God's voice is usually nothing more than a whisper, and you have to listen very carefully to hear it. But other times, in those rarest of moments, the answer is obvious and rings as loud as a church bell. God always answers."

-Pastor Harris, The Last Song

"Never take anyone for granted."

"In the state of grace you trust in yourself and destiny. You can celebrate other people's blessings, knowing that their gifts are right and appropriate for them and that fate has your gift right around the corner."

"Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time."
-Thomas Edison

"Grief is like sinking, like being buried. I am in water the tawny color of kicked-up dirt. Every breath is full of choking. There is nothing to hold onto, no sides, no way to claw myself up. There is nothing to do but let go. Let go. Feel the weight all around you, feel the squeezing of your lungs, the slow, low pressure. Let yourself go deeper. There is nothing but bottom. There is nothing but the taste of metal, and the echoes of old things, and days that look like darkness."

-Lena, Pandemonium

"You can build a future out of anything. A scrap, a flicker. The desire to go forward, slowly, one foot at a time."

-Lena, Pandemonium

"There is so much fragility in kissing, in other people. It is all glass."

-Lena

"There are some things, I guess, that come naturally, even if you've never done them before."

-Lena

"Distance does not ruin people's relationships. You don't have to see someone everyday to be in love."

-Paige-Madison

"Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them."
-The Dalai Lama

"A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. It's only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and over think and hesitate."

"Your biggest challenge isn't someone else. It's the voice inside you that yells, 'I can't!' But you do not listen. You must push forward. Then you hear that voice fade away and start to whisper, 'I can.' That is the moment you discover that the person you thought you were is no match for the one you really are."

"What happened to old fashion love? When the guys chased the girls. When guys would run to open the car door for you. When you could talk to each other in the middle of the grass. When you could spontaneously start dancing in the middle of the street. When saying I love you meant I love you. What happened?"

-Brett Williams

"In some cultures, when they mend broken objects they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something's suffered damage and has a history, it becomes more beautiful."

"I know life isn't life if you just float through it. I know that the whole point is to find the things that matter, and hold onto them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go."

-Lena, Delirium

"Hate is the ugliest form of human behavior. Learn to love."

"You think you know someone and then something happens that changes things and forces you to come to the realization that you don't know them at all. Trust is such a rare thing but it means everything."

-Charley Brooke

"Look at the stars. Look how they shine for you."

-Coldplay

"Not knowing is a thousand times more horrible than facing your fear."

Lone Wolf, Jodi Picoult

"Mistakes are like the memories you hide in an attic: old love letters from relationships that tanked, photos of dead relatives, toys from a childhood you miss. Out of sight is out of mind, but somewhere deep inside you know they still exist. And you also know you're avoiding them."

-Lone Wolf, Jodi Picoult

"Turn around, and the people you thought you knew might chance. That is the reason that dancers learn, early on, how to spot while doing pirouettes:we all want to be able to find the place where we started."

-Lone Wolf

"Doubt is like dye. Once it spreads into the fabric of excuses you've woven, you'll never get rid of the stain."

-Lone Wolf

"Because when you get down to it, the only person you can trust is the one you'd lay down your own life for."

-Lone Wolf

"The scariest thing in the world is thinking that someone you love is going to die."

-Lone Wolf

"Like a missing tooth, sometimes an absence is more noticeable than a presence."

-Jodi Picoult

"Can you really be mad at someone for doing something stupid if they truly, one hundred percent, thought they were doing what was right?"

-Jodi Picoult

i am in love...

with ky markham

that isn't really him, because ky is a fictional character from the AMAZING books "Crossed" & "Matched" by Ally Condie

I wish I could be matched to Ky by Ally Condie & that he was real...

a girl can dream?!

life would be i n c r e d i b l e

i love ky.

Matched

I have a new obsession and favorite book that if you haven’t heard about, I highly recommend buying RIGHT NOW and reading it. If you’re like me, you won’t be able to put it down, it’s a real page turner. I can’t put in words my love for this book—Matched by Ally Condie. It’s been the longest time since I can recall being so drawn in like a magnet to a book. I adore reading. It’s one of my favorite things ever. However, I generally just will read a chapter or two a day of whatever book I happen to be reading at the moment. I read every day. I discovered Matched and once I started reading, I couldn’t stop. I could not put the book down. And when I had to, I was thinking about it and all the questions it raises. It leaves you breathless and your heart pounds in anticipation of what will happen next in the lives of Ky Markham, Cassia Reyes, and Xander Carrow. I am going crazy waiting for November when the second book—Crossed—in the Matched Trilogy is released.

     I know I haven’t posted much about my life and quotes and the usual pictures/picture quotes I am constantly sharing with you. I recently have posted many reviews about Nicholas Sparks and his movies and books, which I love, but I believe Matched is even better! (Who ever thought those words would come out of my mouth?!) I just have to review this book and post some quotes and info all about Matched because I want to share with you this incredible book that is a treasure to me and I hold near and dear to my heart.

     The plot summary is—In the society, officials decide. Who you love. Where you work. When you die. Cassia has always trusted their choices. It’s hardly any price to pay for a long life, the perfect job, the ideal mate. So when her best friend appears on the Matching screen, Cassia knows with complete certainty that he is the one…until she sees another face flash for an instant before the screen fades to black. Now Cassia is faced with impossible choices: between Xander and Ky; between the only life she’s known and a path no one else has ever dared follow—between perfection and passion. Matched is a story for right now and storytelling with the resonance of a classic.

        When Cassia Reyes turned 17, she was required by the all-powerful Society to be Matched: “The goal of Matching is twofold: to provide the healthiest possible future citizens for our Society and to provide the best chances for interested citizens to experience successful Family life. It is of the upmost importance to the Society that the Matches be as optimal as possible.”

        There is no other way to be together in Cassia’s high-tech but also heavily handed Society, a future version of our own world. At first Cassia is overjoyed to be Matched with her good friend, the smoothly handsome Xander Carrow, but when she plugged in the microcard she was given, another image shows up, that of rugged, enigmatic Ky Markham.

        Unlike Xander, Ky is an Aberration, an outsider in the Society and someone who can never be with a citizen like Cassia. But Cassia finds herself drawn to Ky even as she feels torn because of her feelings for Xander.

        As Cassia explores her feelings, she discovers that the perfect world she lives in may not be so perfect. She lives in a world, after all, where everyone is Matched at 17 and dies at 80, where people are assigned jobs and places to live.

        This is a place where only a hundred songs and a hundred poems—selected by the Society, of course—have been approved. All others have been destroyed. Cassia wonders just how much of their lives are being controlled by the Society through the ever-present Officials. “And there’s no reason to rebel. Look at what the Society gives us. Good lives. A chance at immortality. The only way it can be ruined is if we ruin it ourselves.”

        This is exactly what Cassia seems to be doing. The headstrong protagonist is suddenly suspicious of everything around her, even as both Xander and Ky pull at different parts of her heart. “Are you supposed to be my Match?” Cassia asks in her head. “Later, I realize the one question that didn’t even cross my mind was the most urgent one of all: Will you keep my secret?”

      

     Don’t take my word for it? Here are some reviews from others about this book.

“Matched is a page-turning, dystopian love story, written with the soul of a poet. Finally, a brave new words that readers from Twilight to The Hunger Games will claim as their own.”

-Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl

Authors of Beautiful Creatures and Beautiful Darkness

“Absolutely riveting! Matched is a must-read.”

-Melissa Marr, author of the Wicked Lovely series

“This futuristic fable of love and free will asks: Can there be freedom without choice? The tale of Cassia’s journey from acceptance to rebellion will draw you in and leave you wanting more.”

-Cassandra Clare, author of The Infernal Devices and The Mortal Instruments series

“I can’t stop thinking about Matched. It’s impossible to put down this enthralling romance, set in a chilling world where every choice is predicted and even love is controlled. I need to know what happens next. More please!”

-Carrie Ryan, author of The Forest of Hands and Teeth and The Dead-Tossed Waves

     This book is incredibly brilliant and thought provoking. It’s definitely got me thinking, wondering, daydreaming, questioning nonstop lately. In my current situation where I’m at in life, the idea of being Matched resonates favorably with me. People get married in the story at 21 to their matches. They are matched on their 17^th birthday. The reason the idea is so appealing to me is that dating is complicated, stressful, and frustrating. It’s been a major failure and disappointment to me. There are unlimited numbers of complications, including but not limited to, social status, money, family, beliefs, insecurities, judgmental people, conceitedness, the fact that most (not all) guys are immature, don’t want to settle down, and just want to “have fun” and then move on to the next girl like players in a game called love, when it’s not a game, and they aren’t playing for love, it’s lust, etc. And waiting for “the one” is excruciating. Who likes waiting? But I know the best things come to those who wait.

     It would be nice and easy to know who I’m going to marry, that the right guy was chosen for me, and I didn’t have to worry about dating or being alone forever. I think many people would agree with this statement at first glance. Sometimes being single can feel like limbo, pure confusion: a state of instability, uncertainty, stress, not married yet alone dating, just single watching the world pass you by and all the happy couples and the powerlessness to change anything…just stuck watching time as a young person ticks away, youth passing you by.

     But time goes by fast… even when it seems incomprehensibly slow, and I honestly believe that love finds you when the time is right, when you’re ready. When it all comes down to it, I wouldn’t want to be in Cassia’s shoes. Clearly the Matched system is flawed. It’s all about control. No one has a choice. I wouldn’t want the Society choosing my husband. I’d rather be forever single than forced to be with someone I didn’t like or truly love, unable to be with the one I loved—now that is a situation of no control. We are beyond blessed to have free agency and we have it for a reason—it’s a blessing.

     

Here are some of my favorite quotes from Matched… WARNING some quotes contain spoilers so if you want to read the book and be surprised, don’t read the quotes below!!!

“What is the point of having something lovely if you never share it?”

-Cassia Reyes

“How can we appreciate anything fully when overwhelmed with so much?”

-Cassia

“Why are some things easier to write than say?”

-Cassia

“It is strange how we hold onto the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures.”

-Cassia

“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 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.”

-Cassia

“I am too fragile. I am trapped in glass and I want to break out and breathe deeply but I’m too afraid that it will hurt.”

-Cassia

“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.”

-Cassia

“Cassia. I know which life is my real life now. No matter what happens. It’s the one with you. For some reason, knowing that even one person knows my story makes things different. Maybe it’s like the poem says. Maybe this is my way of not going gentle. I love you.”

-Ky Markham

“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.”

-Cassia

“Now that I’ve found the way to fly, which direction should I go into the night? My wings aren’t white or feathered, they’re green, made of green silk, which shudders in the wind and bends when I move—first in a circle, then in a line, finally in a shape of my own invention. The black behind me doesn’t worry me, neither do the stars ahead.”

“Do not go gentle into that good night.

Old age should burn and rave at close of day

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.”

-Dylan Thomas, 1914-1953

“they were too much to carry

So I left them behind

For a new life, in a new place

But no one forgot who I was

I didn’t

And neither did the people who watch

They watched for years

They watch now.”

-Ky

“My birthday began with the water—

Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name

Above the farms and the white horses

And I rose

In rainy autumn

And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.”

-Dylan Thomas

“I believe in you.”

-Ky

I pull away first because I have something to write before our time ends. I’ve been practicing in air, but I want to carve in earth.

“Close your eyes,” I say to Ky, and I bend down, his breathing above me white he waits. “There,” I say and he looks at what I’ve written.

I love you.

I feel embarrassed, as though I am a child who has tapped out these words on her scribe and held them out for a boy in her First School class to read. My writing is awkward and straggly and not smooth like Ky’s.

Why are some things easier to write than say?

Still, I feel undeniably brave and vulnerable as I stand there in the forest with words that I cannot take back. My first written words, other than our names. It’s not much of a poem, but I think Grandfather would understand.

Ky looks at me. For the first time since the showing, I see tears in his eyes.

“You don’t have to write it back,” I say, feeling self-conscious. “I just wanted you to know.”

“I don’t want to write it back,” he tells me. 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.

“Every minute you spend with someone gives them a part of your life and takes part of theirs.”

“Growing apart doesn’t change the fact that for a long time now we grew side by side—our roots will always be tangled. I’m glad for that.”

“Once you want something, everything changes.”

“So in the middle of all the noise, I point to the sky. I hope he understands what I mean, because I mean so many things: MY heart will always fly his name. I won’t go gentle. I’ll find a way to soar like the angels in his stories and I will find him. And I know he understands as he looks straight at me, deep into my eyes. His lips move silently, and I know what he says: the words of a poem that only two people in the world know. Tears well up but I blink them away. Because if there is one moment in my life I want to see clearly, this is it.”

“They are giving us pieces of a real life instead of the whole thing. They have perfected the art of giving us just enough freedom, just enough that when we are ready to snap, a little bone is offered and we roll over, belly up, comfortable and placated like a dog.”

“I honestly believe that what I do is worthwhile no matter what anyone else thinks.”

-Ally Condie

     The movie rights for Matched have been sold already (which doesn’t surprised me in the slightest!). And what makes this even more exciting to me is Director-Producer Adam Shankman is the one who signed this deal and behind this. For those of you who don’t know who he is, he directed A Walk To Remember, has been a judge on So You Think You Can Dance, choreographed one of the Spice Girls’ tours, and also has produced and/or directed The Wedding Planner, Hairspray, 17 Again, and The Last Song to name just a few of his works. So this will be amazing.

     MTV had a Dystopian Week and Ally Condie gave three reasons why dystopian books resonate:

Just like your first kiss, you never forget your first. Mine was “1984”. (No, not my first kiss. I am not that old). But the first dystopian novel I read was that wonderful book by Orwell. When I finished it, I was crying my eyes out, and I thought, “What on earth was that?” Like a first kiss, a first dystopian changes things. The world looks a little bit different when you’ve finished reading/kissing—or, the world can look the same, and that’s unsettling too.

We all have something huge we have to fight. We don’t all have Big Brother or cruel governments wanting to keep us down. But we do all have something we have to push back against, to break free from—whether it’s societal constraints or physical or emotional hardships or the ache of our own fears and weaknesses. When we read dystopia, we root for these people to break free because we are these people—hoping and fighting against things that are bigger than ourselves.

It makes us feel alive. There’s nothing like reading about a world that feels dead to throw your own beautiful, colorful life into sharp relief. This, some might argue (and they would be right), can happen with all good stories. But I think it’s extra poignant when one reads dystopian novels—when you see what can be lost, you know what you, personally, would refuse to lose.

     I believe you get the picture that this is a book you should most definitely read. I hope it touches you like it did me! And this is one book you can judge by its cover which is lovely as the book itself.