Lauren Oliver Quotes

It occurs to me that for a long time she has been doing
her own version of resisting.

Remember everyone's path is different. Amid constant broadcast & comparison, it's the most loving thing you can do for yourself. #LOveTip

Waterbury, he answers immediately. My stomach knots up. I know it's stupid - I know the stakes are higher than the two of us - but I can't help but feel a flash of anger. Of course he disagrees with me. Of course.

And then she left, and it broke my heart so completely I could hardly breathe.

He liked to put his cigarettes out on my tongue.

The horizon is touched with red: the sun is rising, a rusty colour, the colour of old blood, and I'm so filled with fear it is an agony, a shredding feeling, worse than any nightmare I've ever had.

The past week and a half has slipped away so quickly, I can't remember individual days: Everything blurs together, turns the muddled gray of a confused dream.

The sky doesn't set so much as break apart. The horizon is brick-coloured. The rest of the sky is streaked with shock-red tendrils.

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.

I'll find you," he says, watching me with the eyes I remember. "I won't let you go again

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.

but then I realize he's drenched, soaked in blood: blood

What was the point of trying at all, if in the end you were no better, no longer, no more real than a bathroom sink and a rust stain?

Roses are red, violets are blue, if I get you in bed, it would be really cool.

and I'm thrown backward. I land on my left elbow, hear it crack. Pain splinters through me. A Scavenger looms over me. Impossible to say whether

The dagger pin is all I have left. It is comfort and pain, both, because it reminds me of all I've had, held, and had taken from me.
It is my pen, too. With it, I write my story, again and again, in the walls. So I don't forget. So it becomes real.
I think of: Conrad's hands, Rachel's dark hair, Lena's rosebud mouth, how when she was an infant, I used to sneak into her bedroom and hold her while she slept. Rachel never let me - from birth, she screamed, kicked, would have woken the household and the street.
But Lena lay still and warm in my arms, submerged in some secret dreamland.
And she was my secret: those nighttime hours, that twin heartbeat space, the darkness, the joy.

Julian is somewhere among those lights, in that blur of people and buildings. I wonder whether he's scared. I wonder whether he's thinking of me.

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

- And you completely blow me away and rip my world up and everything else, and then you go back to ignoring me."
"I blew you away?" I squeak out before I can stop myself.
He stares at me steadily. "You blew everything away.

He cut the insides of my eyelids with razors.

Raven has lost deeply, again and again, and she, too, has buried herself. There are pieces of her scattered all over. Her heart is nestled next to a small set of bones buried beside a frozen river, which will emerge with the spring thaw, a skeleton ship rising out of the water.

Everyone knows that only wishes that are kept secret will ever come true.

And even if she isn't - even if by some miracle, she survived the escape and has been squeezing out a living in the Wilds - she would never join forces with the resisters. She would never be violent or vengeful. Not Lena, who used to practically faint when she pricked a finger, who couldn't even lie to a teacher about being late. She wouldn't have the stomach for it.

Fourth period I have "life skills", which is what they call gym when you're old enough to be offended by forced physical activity (Elody thinks they should call it slavery instead, for accuracy).

And then we're kissing. His lips are soft and leave mine tingling. I close my eyes, and in the darkness behind them I see beautiful blooming things, flowers spinning like snowflakes, and hummingbirds beating the same rhythm as my heart. I'm gone, lost, floating away into nothingness like I am in my dream, but this time it's a good feeling - like soaring, like being totally free. His other hand pushes my hair from my face, and I can feel the impression of his fingers everywhere that they touch, and I think of stars streaking through the sky and leaving burning trails behind them, and in that moment - however long it lasts, seconds, minutes, days - while he's saying my name into my mouth and Im breathing into him, I realize this, right here, is the first and only time I've ever been kissed.

And, of course, we kiss. We kiss so much that when we're not kissing it feels weird, like I get used to breathing through his lips and into his mouth.

At a certain point your brain stops to rationalize things. At a certain point it gives up, shuts off, shuts down.

Thing that don't matter when you've lived the same day

It's the time of the night I like best, when most people are asleep and it feels like the world belongs completely to my friends and me, as though nothing exists apart from out little circle: everywhere else is darkness and quiet.

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.

Over the past week, I've accepted that I will never love Julian as much as I loved Alex. But now that idea is overwhelming, like a wall between us. I will never love Julian like I love Alex.

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 memories seem like snapshots from someone else's life.

Strains of music spring up, crystallizing in the night air like rain turning suddenly to snow, drifting to earth.

...how in the end it's impossible to understand the finality of certain things, certain words, certain moments.

He wasn't afraid. He just didn't care. And that was very, very different.

I'd rather die my way than live yours.

In the lower half of one wall, she has traced the word so many times in such enormous script - LOVE, each letter the size of a child - and gouged so deeply into the stone that the O has formed a tunnel, and she has gotten out.

And we'll punish the people who don't conform. Not bodily of course. This is a civilized country.

I know I must look like a fish, standing there with my mouth gaping open, but I'm

Lindsay calls them the Pugs: pretty from far away, ugly up close.

Don't believe her.

Letting go is easy: it's all downhill.

I tear down Baxter, which loops around the last mile down to Back Cove.
And then I stop short. The buildings have fallen away behind me, giving way to ramshackle sheds, sparsely situated on either side of the cracked and run-down road. Beyond that, a short strip of tall, weedy grass slants down toward the cove.
The water is an enormous mirror, tipped with pink and gold from the sky. In that single, blazing moment as I come around the bend, the sun - curved over the dip of the horizon like a solid gold archway - lets out its final winking rays of light, shattering the darkness of the water, turning everything white for a fraction of a second, and then falls away, sinking, dragging the pink and the red and the purple out of the sky with it, all the color bleeding away instantly and leaving only dark.
Alex was right. It was gorgeous - one of the best I've ever seen.

There's a poster with Thomas Edison's quote: GENIUS IS 1 PERCENT INSPIRATION AND 99 PERCENT PERSPIRATION.

That's the thing: We didn't really care. A world without love is also a world without stakes.

Love, the deadliest of all deadly things.
It kills you.
Alex.
When you have it.
Alex.
And when you don't.
Alex.

The normalcy of it almost kills me. Even in a world turned upside down, a world of war and insanity, people hang their clothing; they fold their pants; they make their beds.
It is the only way.

It's the way he says my name: like music.

For a moment, my heart aches for him. I should never have asked him to join me here; I should
never have asked him to cross.

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.

Maybe next time, but probably not.

There are many words in the English language that you never want to hear you father say. Enema. Orgasm. Disappointed.

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

That's what everyone wanted, in the end: to be part of something bigger.

Black is too morbid; red will set them on edge; pink is too juvenile; orange is freakish

I was going to tell you that you look beautiful with your hair down. That's all I was going to say.

That's the thing about hearts. They don't get put back together, not really. They just get patched. But the damage is still there.

This was what being cured was like: like being in a fishbowl, circling always inside the same glass.

I'm mesmerized by the way his fingers move confidently along her skin, as though her body is his to reat and touch and tend to. She was mine before she was yours: The words are there, unexpectedly, surging from my throat to my tongue. I swallow them back.

Everything passed; that was partly why it was so beautiful. Things would get difficult. But that was okay too.

I'm overwhelmed with sadness for everything that was lost, and filled with anger toward the people who took it away. My people-or at least, my old people. I don't know who I am anymore, or where I belong.
That's not totally true ... I know I belong with Alex.

I don't care about that," he says, lower. Another pause, and then: "I just don't want you to hate me.

This is not what I wantef. This is not why I came to the Wilds, why Alex wanted me to come: not to turn my back and bury the people I care about, and build myself hard and careless on top of their bodies, as Raven does. This is what Zombies do.

I'm a nonperson, a shadow, a ghost. Even before the accident I'm not sure that I was a whole person - that's what I'm realizing now. And I'm not sure where the damage begins.

If we could just float along, like snow.

With 'Delirium,' I had to spend time thinking about the political, social and religious structure of a different world. But it was a fun challenge.

An open society is a healthy society; transparency is necessary to trust.

Above our heads, the stars flare and glitter and flash: thousands and thousands of them, so many thousands they look like snowflakes whirling away into the inky dark.

Alex's T-shirt is red, and for a second I think it's a trick of the light, but then I realise he's drenched, soaked in blood: blood seeping across his chest, like the stain seeping up the sky, bringing another day to the world. Behind him is that insect army of men, all running toward him at once, guns drawn. The guards are coming too, reaching for him from both sides ... The helicopter has him fixed in it's spotlight. He is standing white and still and frozen in its beam, and I don't think I have ever, in my life, seen anything more beautiful than him.

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.

She knew that this ... feeling couldn't last forever. Everything passed, that was partly why it was so beautiful. Things would get difficult again, but that was okay too.

The whole point of growing up is learning to stay on the laughing side.

On the day that started it all, that rocketed me forward and landed me here, in this new body, in this new future.

Only when it rains. and sometimes, too, when i remember.

I've learned to get really good at this - say one thing when I'm thinking about something else, act like I'm listening when I'm not, pretend to be calm and happy when I'm really freaking out. It's one of the skills you perfect as you get older

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

Funny how things can stay the same forever and then change so quickly.

What the hell is the matter with you?" My voice is low. I have to push the words out past the hard lump of anger in my throat. "I - I'm sorry," Alex whispers. He shakes his head. "I didn't mean ... I don't know what happened. I'm sorry, Lena." If

I cry for everything I abandoned and because I, too, have been left behind
by Alex, by my mom, by time that has cut through our worlds and separated us.

You have to understand. i wasn't just thinking of me. i was thinking of her, too.

The last thing I need is to morph into one of those people who's always wearing black and doodling guns and bombs on her notebook.

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.

Nothing has ever been so painful or delicious as being so close to him and being unable to do anything about it: like eating ice cream so fast on a hot day you get a splitting headache.

She's the kind of person who makes you feel drunk just by being around her, like suddenly the world's edges are dulled and all of the colors are spinning together.

How did I love her?
Let me count the ways.
The freckles on her nose like the shadow of a shadow; the way she chewed on her lower lip when she walked and how when she ran she looked like she was born going fast and how she fit perfectly against my chest; her smell and the touch of her lips and her skin, which was always warm, and how she smiled.
Like she had a secret.
How she always made up words during Scrabble. Hyddym (secret music). Grofp (cafeteria food). Quaw (the sound a baby duck makes). How she burped her way through the alphabet once, and I laughed so hard I spat out soda through my nose.
And how she looked at me like I could save her from everything bad in the world.
This was my secret: she was the one who saved me.

What I meant was, you looked happier in the pictures.

Sometimes, in periods of oppression and mass insanity, the most decisive form of resistance is simply the decision to not engage.

The hours here are flat and round, disks of gray layered one on top of the other ... they move slowly, at a grind, until it seems as though they are not moving at all. They are just pressing down ...

It's so good I could cry, and Sarah actually does cry, sitting and sobbing in front of her plate.

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

with a face like a fish pressed to glass; eyes so large they appear distorted. "Is

Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya tomorrow. A beautiful word, when you really think about it.

I just wanted you to be safe," my mother says. "Do you understand that? Safe, and happy. Anything I could do ... even if it meant I couldn't be with you ...

That's the whole point, after all: There's no going back.

My mother had soft hands that smelled like soap, and a smile like the first bit of sunlight creeping over a trimmed lawn.

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

And you can't love, not fully, unless you are loved in return.

Coral slows us down. She has no visible injuries, now that she has bathed and had various cuts and scrapes bandaged, but she is obviously weak. She falls behind as soon as we begin to move, and Alex hangs back with her. In the early part of the day, even though I try to ignore it, I can hear the ribbon of their conversation weaving up and through the other voices. Once, I hear Alex burst out laughing. In

Maybe Lindsay and I are best friends and we hate each other, both. Maybe I'm only one math class away from being a slut like Anna Cartullo. Maybe I am like her, deep down. Maybe we all are: just one lunch period away from eating alone in the bathroom. I wonder if it's ever really possible to know the truth about someone else, or if the best we can do is just stumble into each other, heads down, hoping to avoid collision.