Lauren DeStefano Quotes

I never wanted to live forever, I just wanted enough time.

Every star has been set in the sky. We mistakenly think they were put there for us.

Hush-a-bye, don't you cry
Go to sleepy, little baby
When you wake, you shall have
All the pretty little horses
Way down yonder in the meadow
Lies a poor little lambie
Bees and butterflies, picking out its eyes ...

There is a silence so great that I can hear the ice crystals cracking and falling from eyelashes of girls who will never blink again.

I think, in this strange world of beautiful things, there may be some humanity after all.

I watch the perfectly imperfect people several stories below, living their perfectly imperfect lives, and I think about how many decades will have to pass before the whole world can be like that again. I think about how many decades will pass before someone gets another idea to make the world perfect and destroys it completely.

It's the silence I imagine in the rest of the world, the silence of an endless ocean and uninhabitable island, a silence that can be seen from space.

I shake my head, watching snow tumble and swirl from an all-white sky. The world seems so clean if you only look up

It isn't a perfect place. There are no perfect places. But nobody cares about perfection when there are sand castles to build and kites to chase, children that are being born, old hearts that are giving in.

To die trying would be better than to die without purpose.

He looks at me, and I don't know what he sees. I used to think it was Rose. But she's not here with us now, in this room. It's just him and me, and the books. I feel like our lives are in those books. I feel like all the words on the pages are for us.

You can't be afraid. You can be sad if you like. You can be angry. But it's the fear that'll freeze you in place.

Tell freedom I said hello.'
'If I happen to see it, I will.

He has a face like composted Broccoli

I should not have loved my daughter as I did. Not in this world in which nothing lives for long. You children are flies. You are roses. You multiply and die.

All we were taught of geography was that the world had once been made up of seven continents and several countries, but a third world war demolished all but North America, the continent with the most advanced technology.

It is the face of a girl who has seen the world, who realizes that it hates her, and who hates it in return.

The clouds took on the shape of dancers; from somewhere far off, Pram heard music before the clouds became normal again.

A feeling can't kill you.

Fate, I think, is a thief.

A girl should never stop thinking.

I had this feeling like the solution to everything would be down there if only I could dig through all those clouds.

I find my way back to the door, leaving him to his new day so he may think of Rose, whose sunrises are numbered.

I miss something I never even had.

I dream of where I am, and what lies before me. I do not dream of where I've been or what I've left behind. I tell myself that this is what I've wanted from the moment I was captured, and that I should be happy.

Living in a place like this, she must have learned how to see all the monsters that can hide a person.

She would do anything, anything to belong to his son after a lifetime of belonging to no one at all.

The world seems so clean if you only looked up.

I have seen my father concede to utter defeat in the hospital room. I've heard him choke on sobs and whisper angry things to the god of the sky when he thought I was asleep at Lex's bedside. I know that those uniforms are worn by men - only men.

We're all born an empty page.

Vaughn is talking about the heat, and his voice is so excited that it breaks into whispers at times. He loves his madness the way a bird loves the sky.

I just hate to see you like this," he says. "Isn't there anything I can do?"

You could murder Vaughn. You could free Gabriel. You could help repair the damage that's been done to our home. By you.

This room is surely being recorded, though, and all I say is, "No."

He tilts my chin, and then he cups his hands around my ear and whispers, "I don't believe that."

I look at him, and I see the same look in his eyes as on the morning when I told him I was going to bring Linden home. Vaughn may be Rowan's benefactor, but I'm his twin sister. Even after this time spent apart, he can read me.

There's a limit to how much living can be done in a life without freedom.

Give me time"

"For you, always.

I'm dreading fall. It is a terrifying season,' he says finally. 'Everything shriveling up and dying.' I don't know how to answer. Fall has always been my favorite season. The time when everything bursts with its last beauty, as if nature had been saving up all year for the grand finale. I've never thought to be frightened of it.

Basil would never go for this - me chasing after an accused murderer in the darkness. He says there's nothing wrong with me, but it's entirely possible he hasn't been paying enough attention.

Words like 'unputdownable' and 'irresistible' are simply not enough for Cat Winters's In the Shadow of Blackbirds. Days after finishing this story, it remains the first thought I have in the morning, and the thing that haunts me until I sleep.

And then I wonder, does my brother think of me this way? We entered this world together, one after the other, beats in a pulse. But I will be first to leave it. That's what I've been promised. When we were children, did he dare to imagine an empty space beside him where I then stood giggling, blowing soap bubbles through my fingers?
When I die, will he be sorry that he loved me? Sorry that we were twins?
Maybe he already is.

There is a dark place calling to me, but I will not go just yet. I know I can't return from it.

I want to make the world into something better so that he can be okay.

Don't you miss it?" I say. "Being free."
He laughs.

And so ends his rush from his greatest act of rebellion. He understands that no matter where he runs or how high he flies, he will always have to come home.

When I was little, my brother drew an image for me on the train ride home from the academy. It was a map of Internment, only instead of the real city, he'd drawn a castle for the clock tower. And the buildings were all different somehow. Mysterious. And right at the edge he drew a ladder that went down and disappeared into the clouds. It was the most spectacular thing I'd ever seen, and getting ready for my bath that night, I discovered it had fallen from a hole on my skirt pocket. I wanted to go out and look for it, but my mother told me the sweepers had already come. The paper would be collected with all the other forgotten-about things and it would be compressed and recycled into something new.
I looked for it the next day, anyway, to no avail. I couldn't believe such a wonderful thing could be destroyed so simply. I learned that it could. Anything could be destroyed.

When I call his name, it's a sound almost entirely out of my control. It soars over the crowd and hits him. Even from where I'm standing, I can tell that he recognized my voice. Hastily he unwinds himself from the girl, stands to attention like an animal sensing danger. And I try to call him again, but that word, that name, was all I had the energy for. I barely have the strength left to stand.
I wait helplessly for him to find the sound, and when he does, when his heterochromatic eyes meet mine, my mouth forms the word again, but just barely. The girl at his side disappears. The crowd blurs into senseless shapes and colors. I can't feel my heart or my body or the heat of the flames.
I can only see his face - his bewildered, beautifully familiar face.

In another time, another place, I wonder who we would have been to each other.

I was born into a world that was already dying; I belong to it.

It's best not to wonder at what cost. Freedom is the only price to pay for anything in this place.

There used to be an entire world of people and countries out there, but they've all since been destroyed by wars so distant they're hardly spoken about.

There's this anomaly that happens sometimes with twins. It occurs in the womb when the fetuses are growing too closely to each other. The stronger twin develops normally, while the weaker twin crumples and is encased by the body of the stronger twin, where it becomes a parasite. The result is a single child, plagued by a twin-shaped fossil inside. Like a tumor.
In death Rose became Linden's parasitic twin. They were two separate organisms once, growing steadily beside each other. Two pulses. Two brains. But she has crumpled and died, and still he carries her inside himself. She goes where he goes, feeling nothing, seeing nothing, a shadow behind his ribs.

I feel unburdened, and after a while I start to imagine that the divan is a boat moving over the ocean. Sunken cities play music beneath the waves. The ghosts are stirring.

There are lots of love stories here ... They either end happily or everyone dies.

Fall has always been my favorite season. The time when everything bursts with its last beauty, as if nature had been saving up all year for the grand finale.

But we frightened him, us girls, with our intensity, the weight of our sadness and the sharpness of our hearts

It was my fifth grade teacher who introduced the idea that writing could be more than a hobby for me.

My face is burning and I want to kick her, I want to kick her, I want to kick her.

Procedures. Like "incident," this is another word that covers a broad range of unpleasant things.

Stone gnomes and angels filled the gardens, and it seemed that they were also sleeping, as though a witch had cast a spell on them.

Don't bury your sense of wonder. It's a rare thing, and one of the things I adore most about you" -Basil

Silence was not the absence of presence - it was its own presence

Momentum,' She repeats. 'You can't just stand there if you want something to fly. You have to run.

It's very early, still dark, but outside there's the warm smell of springtime, like things rotting and blooming in one stagnant mist. I realize now that I've always craved the brutality of it. Shoots forcing their way up from the earth, petals popping open.
The start of life is always brutal, isn't it? We're born fighting.

The only characters I ever don't like are ones that leave no impression on me. And I don't write characters that leave no impression on me.

I wanted someone, somewhere, whom I might never meet, to read a sentence I wrote and think, I thought I was the only one who felt that way.

As a teen I was totally that dumpy overweight nerdy girl that nobody wants to be in the stories you're told. And now I am a dumpy overweight nerdy adult and life is beautiful like a song. I'm not a flower that bloomed in the mud. Just a girl who stayed steady on the path of determination.

I wonder what it's like for her, looking so much like a dead girl.

Old cheerful songs about frivolous things that mean nothing to me.

You're insane, you know that?" he says.
"It's the only thing keeping me afloat," I say.

Her smile is her revenge.

There was a desperate undercurrent to our marriage
a feeling of being in a dream from which I couldn't seem to awaken. A nagging sense that my life, laid out so neatly like the clothes Deirdre left on my divan, was no longer my own.

I want to make a world more magical than my own. I don't care if it makes sense, I don't care if it's ridiculed or if, rather than a neat round planet that goes around forever, it ends with a cliff that falls off into nothing. I want to have my eyes wide open, and I want to see this room and at the same time, not this room.

Helplessly I look at him. He will never be just Rowan again. I will never be just Rhine. Everything has been tampered with.

You have all heard the warnings about the edge. We have been told its winds are a song that will hypnotize us, and by the time we awaken from that trance, it will be too late.

So many of the things I've wanted are the things I've been taught to fear.

We're born moving forward. Sometimes we lose people along the way, and all we can do is watch them get smaller behind us as we move on and on.

We destroy things with our curiosity. We shatter with our best intentions

Felix had left his heart buried in the ground years ago, but he felt it crack apart.

Because even if the lie is beautiful, the truth is what you face in the end.

I'll tell you something about true love. There's no science to it. It's as natural as the sky.

I 'd never seen him cry; I didn't think he could . It would have to take something greater than the end of the world to reduce Vaughn Ashby to tears .

Jenna, standing in the doorway with her mouth and hand full of shelled pistachios, says, 'Real' is a dirty word in this place'.

Maybe it is desperation," I say. "Maybe we can't let things fall apart without trying. We can't let go of the people we love."
He looks at me, and in the sunlight his eyes come alive with greens and golds. "Sometimes we can," he says.

Birdie's presence was gentle and quiet, but her absence is violent.

Do I care for her? No. She tried to kill me and I don't especially like what she does with her hair.

Most dystopian, classic and contemporary, paints a future world that puts a twist on present society - a future world that could plausibly happen.

I nod like I'm not at all unnerved by this new cold side to him. Not cruel like his father. Not warm like the husband who sought me out on quiet nights. Something in between. This Linden has never woven his fingers through mine, never chosen me from a line of weary Gathered girls, never said he loved me in a myriad of coloured lights. We are nothing to each other.

Hope, that risky, illustrious thing. It should have gone extinct by now, but we keep it alive.

And about a thousand other things, he says, pausing sometimes between his words, making sure he has them right. I get the sense that words are not sufficient tools for him to build what's going on in his head as he stands before me.

Whenever there's something I don't like about a stranger, I try to imagine that someone out there loves them, and it puts them in a different light.

You can't just stand there if you want something to fly. You have to run -Cecily

She's beautiful and graceful, and she is very compassionate and loyal when you aren't responsible for the murder of her family.

People die, and everything they've ever said just echoes around and around. There's nothing new. Only the same nonsense from their lives.

He was now working his way through the many shades of grief. Sadness made everything gray, he'd learned, but there were different types of gray, some darker than others. There were dark spots in his memories he wasn't brave enough to enter.

Thick black smoke disappears into the darkness of night, blotting out patches of stars. Somewhere up there, higher than his world and mine, is the place where all things go when they have stopped breathing. It is a place my brother visited. Up where it's quiet and calm, and prayers are able to drift up higher than words or wishes or wants.

Even things that aren't broken can be fixed.

I am intrigued. I am fearless.

Write words you're willing to burn at the stake for. Write words you'd believe in even if the rest of the world didn't.

Every generation has a macabre notion that wars, government prohibition, natural disasters or mankind itself could be the downfall of society and the world as a whole.

It was a terrible decision, and I confess I'd make it again.

Our parents' death broke his sense of wonder. My left-brained brother, who once had dreams of saving the world, now laughs at anyone who tries.

All my unanswered questions are in the smoke and bottles she drew, begging to be burned away.