Lauren oliver quotes

Someday she will be saved, and the past and all its pain will be rendered as smoothly palatable as the food we spoon to our babies.

Feelings aren't forever. Time waits for no one, but progress waits for man to enact it.

Dystopian novels help people process their fears about what the future might look like; further, they usually show that there is always hope, even in the bleakest future.

There are some losses we never get over.

So many things become beautiful when you really look.

I'm used to a feeling of doubleness, of thinking one thing and having to do another, a constant tug-of-war.

I know the past will drag you backward and down, have you snatching at whispers of wind and the gibberish of trees rubbing together, trying to decipher some code, trying to piece together what was broken. It's hopeless. The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside you like a stone.

If you’re smart, you care. And if you care, you love.

You came form different starts and you'll come to different ends.

Hope keeps you alive.

How is it possible, I think, to change so much and not be able to change anything at all?

I know what the problem is, of course. The disorientation, the distraction, the difficulty focusing - all classic Phase One signs of deliria. But I don't care. If pneumonia felt this good I'd stand out in the snow in the winter with bare feet and no coat, or march into the hospital and kiss pneumonia patients

This is what I want. This is the only thing I've ever wanted. Everything else—every single second of every single day that has come before this very moment, this kiss—has meant nothing.

Unhappiness is bondage; therefore, happiness is freedom.

But maybe you carried your demons with you everywhere, the way you carried your shadow.

You have to go forward: It's the only way. You have to go forward no matter what happens. This is the universal law.

Most of the time one night blends into the next and weeks blend into weeks and months into other months. And sooner or later we all die. But at the beginning of the night anything’s possible.

And it's the funniest thing: as soon as I see it, the whistling in my ears stops and the feeling of terror drains away, and I realize this whole time I haven't been falling at all. I've been floating.

I know the rules. I've been living here longer than you have." He cracks a smile then. He nudges me back. "Hardly." "Born and raised. You're a transplant." I nudge him again, a little harder, and he laughs and tries to catch hold of my arm. I squirm away, giggling, and he stretches out to tickle my stomach. "Country bumpkin!" I squeal, as he grabs out and wrestles me back onto the blanket, laughing. "City slicker," he says, rolling over on top of me, and then kisses me. Everything dissolves: heat, explosions of color, floating.

I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa

It's like a razor blade edging its way through my organs, shredding me, all I can think is: It will kill me, it will kill me, it will kill me. And I don't care.

Everything I see and touch reminds me of him, and so everything I see and touch is perfect.

And you should hear the music. Incredible, amazing music, like nothing you've ever heard, music that almost takes your head off, you know? That makes you want to scream and jump up and down and break stuff and cry.

I was glad when the Invalids were executed. Some people complained that lethal injection was too humane for convicted terrorists, but I thought it sent a powerful message: We are not the evil ones. We are reasonable and compassionate. We stand for fairness, structure, and organization. It’s the other side, the uncureds, who bring the chaos.

The most dangerous sicknesses are those that make us believe we are well

We are always being pushed and squeezed down one road or another. We have no choice but to step forward, and then step forward again, and then step forward again; suddenly we find ourselves on a road we haven't chosen at all.

How can someone have the power to shatter you to dust--and also to make you feel so whole?

There's always some relief in giving up.

My heart is fluid and soaring. There's no longer any space between heartbeats.

If you cross a line and nothing happens, the line loses meaning.

That's when you realize that most of it-life, the relentless mechanism of existing-isn't about you. It doesn't include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you've jumped the edge. Even after you're dead.

Love: It will kill you and save you, both

We are all punished for the lives we have chosen, in one way or another.

I'd rather die on my own terms than live on theirs. I'd rather die loving Alex than live without him.

Music, I think, he makes me feel like music

Promise me we'll stay together, okay? His eyes are once again the clear blue of a perfectly transparent pool. They are eyes to swim in, to float in, forever. "You and me". "I promise". I say. behind us the door creaks open, and I turn around, expecting Raven, just as a voice cuts through the air: "Don't believe her.

And a face above mine, white and beautiful, eyes as large as the moon. You saved me. A hand on my cheek, cool and dry. Why did you save me? Words welling up on a tide: No, the opposite. Eyes the colour of a dawn sky, a crown of blond hair, so bright and white and blinding I could swear it was a halo.

I guess that’s just part of loving people: You have to give things up. Sometimes you even have to give them up.

Please understand. Please forgive me. I prayed every day for you to be alive, until hope became painful. Don't hate me. I still love you.

The devil stole into the Garden of Eden. He carried with him the disease - amor deliria nervosa - in the form of a seed. It grew and flowered into a magnificent apple tree, which bore apples as bright as blood. -From Genesis: A Complete History of the World and the Known Universe, by Steven Horace, PhD, Harvard University

Grief is like sinking, like being buried.

You don't reach points in life at which everything is sorted out for us. I believe in endings that should suggest our stories always continue.

That's the thing about best friends. That's what they do. They keep you from spinning off the edge.

Sometimes I'm afraid to go to sleep because of what I'm leaving behind.

I don't love you, Lena. Do you hear me? I never love you.

That was what her parents did not understand—and had never understood—about stories. Liza told herself storied as though she was weaving and knotting an endless rope. Then, no matter how dark or terrible the pit she found herself in, she could pull herself out, inch by inch and hand over hand, on the long rope of stories.

It's so strange how life works: You want something and you wait and wait and feel like it's taking forever to come. Then it happens and it's over and all you want to do is curl back up in that moment before things changed.

Welcome to the free world. We give people the power to choose. They can even choose the wrong thing. Beautiful, isn't it?

The flip side of freedom is this: When you're completely free, you're also completely on your own.

Things would get difficult again. But that was okay too. The bravery was in moving forward, no matter what.

This is the first day of my new beginning. From now on I'm going to do things right. I'm going to be a different person, a good person. I'm going to be the kind of person who would be remembered well, not just remembered.

It amazes me how easy it is for things to change, how easy it is to start off down the same road you always take and wind up somewhere new. Just one false step, one pause, one detour, and you end up with new friends or a bad reputation or a boyfriend or a breakup. It's never occurred to me before; I've never been able to see it. And it makes me feel, weirdly, like maybe all of these different possibilities exist at the same time, like each moment we live has a thousand other moments layered underneath it that look different.

people themselves are full of tunnels: winding, dark spaces and caverns; impossible to know all the places inside of them. Impossible even to imagine.

And then, just at that moment, when I'm no longer sure if I'm dreaming or awake or walking some valley in between where everything you wish for comes true, I feel the flutter of his lips on mine.

The secret is,” I say, whispering right into his ear, “that yours was the best kiss I’ve ever had in my life.” “But I’ve never kissed you,” he whispers back. Around us the rain sounds like falling glass. “Not since third grade, anyway.” I smile, but I’m not sure if he can see it. “Better get started, then,” I say, “because I don’t have much time.

I wonder if this is how people always get close: They heal each other's wounds; they repair the broken skin.

Human beings, in their natural state, are unpredictable, erratic, and unhappy. It is only once their animal instincts are controlled that they can be responsible, dependable, and content.

i suppose that's the secret, if you're ever wishing for things to back the way they were. You just have to look up.

I said, I prefer the ocean when it's gray. Or not really gray. A pale, in-between color. It reminds me of waiting for something good to happen.

We stand there for a moment, looking at each other, and in that instant I feel our connection so strongly it's as though it achieves physical existence, becomes a hand all around us, cupping us together, protecting us. This is what people are always talking about when they talk about god: this feeling, of being held and understood and protected. feeling this way seems about as close to saying a prayer as you could get.

Through wind, and tempest, storm, and rain; The calm shall be buried inside of me; A warm stone, heavy and dry; The root, the source, a weapon against pain

Po flickered. "Thank you?" it repeated. "What is that?" Liesl thought. "It means, You were wonderful," she said. "It means, I couldn't have done it without you.

Time and space recede and blast away like a universe expanding forever outward, and leaving only darkness and the two of us on its periphery, darkness and breathing and touch.

He is no longer mine to lose, but the grief is there, a gnawing sense of disbelief.

There is no before. There is only now, and what comes next.

His eyes are the color of honey. These are the eyes I remember from my dreams.

Like I've been sketched by an amateur artist: if you don't look too closely, it's all right, but start focusing and all the smudges and mistakes become really obvious.

No one had ever told her this basic fact: not everyone got to be loved.

Yeah, but our choices are limited. We choose from a list that they chose for us." She said. "Well, Choices are supposed to be limited. That's life" I snapped

A good friend keeps your secrets for you. A best friend helps you keep your own secrets.

It's funny, isn't it? When you are young you just want to be old, and then later you wish you could go back to being a kid.

And this, really, is the story-within-the-story, because if you do not believe that hearts can bloom suddenly bigger, and that love can open like a flower out of even the hardest places, then I am afraid that for you the world will be long and brown and barren, and you will have trouble finding the light. But if you do believe, then you already know all about magic.

Fridays are the hardest in some ways: you’re so close to freedom.

There are no happy endings, only breaks in the regular action.

She liked that word: we. It sounded warm and open, like a hug.

Most people don't want to be saved. Besides, if you keep bailing everybody out, they'll never learn to paddle on their own.

Running is a mental sport, more than anything else. You're only as good as your training, and your training is only as good as your thinking.

Lies are just stories, and stories are all that matter. We all tell stories. Some are more truthful than others, maybe, but in the end the only thing that counts is what you can make people believe.

Then I think of the dark, and the lights, and the roaring, and Juliet, and before I can think of anything else, I fight the final few steps to the door and step out into the cold, where the rain is still coming down like shards of moonlight, or like steel.

Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge. That's what it is: an edge; a razor. It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away on either side.

The last laugh, the last cup of coffee, the last sunset, the last time you jump through a sprinkler, or eat an ice-cream cone, or stick your tongue out to catch a snowflake. You just don't know.

Everything in me feels fluttering and free, like I could take off from the ground at any second. Music, I think, he makes me feel like music.

Rainstorms are incredible: falling shards of glass, the air full of diamonds.

Of all the systems of the body - neurological, cognitive, special, sensory - the cardiological system is the most sensitive and easily disturbed. The role of society must be to shelter these systems from infection and decay, or else the future of the human race is at stake. Like a summer fruit that is protected from insect invasion, bruising, and rot by the whole mechanism of modern farming; so must we protect the heart.

...and once at Hana's house, when we stole some blackberry liqueur from her parents' liquor cabinet and drank until the ceiling started spinning overhead. Hana was laughing and giggling, but I didn't like it, didn't like the sweet sick taste in my mouth or the way my thoughts seemed to break apart like a mist in the sun.

Anger is useful only to a certain point. After that, it becomes rage, and rage will make you careless.

And when it started to get dark you pointed to the sky, and told me there was a star for every thing you loved about me.

The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone.

For a second I feel a rush of sadness: for the horizons that vanish behind us, for the people we leave behind, the tiny-doll selves that get stored away and ultimately buried.

When you love someone, when you care for someone, you have to do it through the good and the bad. Not just when you're happy and it's easy.

I've been so used to thinking of what the borders are keeping out that I haven't considered that they're also penning us in.

Maybe you can afford to wait. Maybe for you there's a tomorrow. Maybe for you there's one thousand tomorrows, or three thousand, or ten, so much time you can bathe in it, roll around it, let it slide like coins through you fingers. So much time you can waste it. But for some of us there's only today. And the truth is, you never really know.

Amor deliria nervosa. The deadliest of all deadly things.

Even the greatest movements on earth, have their beginnings with something small.

I love you. Remember. They cannot take it

My heart is drumming in my chest so hard it aches, but it's the good kind of ache, like the feeling you get on the first real day of autumn, when the air is crisp and the leaves are all flaring at the edges and the wind smells just vaguely of smoke - like the end and the beginning of something all at once.

They say that the cure for love will make me happy and safe forever. And I’ve always believed them. Until now. Now everything has changed. Now, I’d rather be infected with love for the tiniest sliver of a second than live a hundred years smothered by a lie

Hearts are fragile things. That's why you have to be so careful.

This was what true fear was--that you could never know other people, not completely. That you were always just guessing blind.

it's weird how much people change. for example, when i was a kid i loved all of these things..and over time all of them just fell away, one after another, replaced by friends and IMing and cell phones and boys and clothes. it's kind of sad, if you think about it. like there's no continuity in people at all. like something ruptures when you hit twelve, or thirteen, or whatever the age is when you're no longer a kid but a "young adult," and after that you're a totally different person. maybe even a less happy person. maybe even a worse one.

This is not the person I wanted to become: Hatred has carved a permanent place inside me, a hollow where things are so easily lost.

That is what hatred is. It will feed you and at the same time turn you to rot. It is hard and deep and angular, a system of blockades. It is everything and total. Hatred is a high tower. In the Wilds, I start to build, and to climb.

I know that the whole point—the only point—is to find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.

I've never really thought about it before, but it's a miracle how many kinds of light there are in the world, how many skies: the pale brightness of spring, when it feels like the hole world's blushing; the lush, bright boldness of a July noon; purple storm skies and a green queasiness just before lightning strikes and crazy multicolored sunsets that look like someone's acid trip.

I'd rather die my way than live yours.

Snapshots, moments, mere seconds: as fragile and beautiful and hopeless as a single butterfly, flapping on against a gathering wind.

..in that moment i realize how much i love the little everyday routines of my life..the details that are my life's special pattern, like how in handwoven rugs what really makes them unique are the tiny flaws in the stitching, little gaps and jumps and stutters that can never be reproduced. so many things become beautiful when you really look.

An eye for an eye." "And the whole world goes blind," Coral puts in quietly.

But you can build a future out of anything. A scrap, a flicker. The desire to go forward, slowly, one foot at a time. You can build an airy city out of ruins.

Sometimes I feel like if you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you - sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever.

The thing is, you don't get to know. It's not like you wake up with a bad feeling in your stomach. You don't see shadows where there shouldn't be any. You don't remember to tell your parents you love them or--in my case--remember to say good-bye to them at all.

In a world without love, this is what people are to each other: values, benefits, and liabilities, numbers and data. We weigh, we quantify, we measure, and the soul is ground to dust.

We all need mantras, I guess - stories we tell ourselves to keep us going.

I don't know whether these feelings - this thing growing inside of me - is something horrible and sick or the best thing that's ever happened to me. Either way, I can't stop it. I've lost control. And the truly sick thing is that despite everything, I'm glad.

i think of all the thousands of billions of steps and missteps and chances and coincidences that have brought me here. Brought you here, and it feels like the biggest miracle in the world.

And now I know why they invented words for love, why they had to: It's the only thing that can come close to describing what I feel in that moment, the baffling mixture of pain and pleasure and fear and joy, all running sharply through me at once.

Everyone just wasting time because they have so much of it to waste, minutes slipping by on who's with who and did you hear.

Are you ever afraid to go to sleep? Afraid of what comes next?” He smiles a sad little smile and I swear it’s like he knows. “Sometimes I’m afraid of what I’m leaving behind,” he says.

Who knows? Maybe they’re right. Maybe we are driven crazy by our feelings. Maybe love is a disease, and we would be better off without it. But we have chosen a different road. And in the end that is the point of escaping the cure: We are free to choose. We are even free to choose the wrong thing.

But how could anyone who's ever seen a summer - big explosion of green and skies lit up electric with splashy sunsets, a riot of flowers and wind that smells like honey - pick the snow?

The deadliest of all deadly things: It kills you both when you have it and when you don’t.

You can't be happy unless you're unhappy sometimes".

I feel an overwhelming rush of sadness... I'm just struck with a sense of time passing so quickly, rushing forward. One day I'll wake up and my whole life will be behind me, and it will seem to have gone as quickly as a dream.

He is my world and my world is him and without him there is no world.

Hate isn’t the most dangerous thing, he’d said. Indifference is.