Requiem Lauren Oliver Quotes

Take down the walls.
Otherwise you must live closely, in fear, building barricades against the unknown, saying prayers against the darkness, speaking verse of terror and tightness.
Otherwise you may never know hell, but you will not find heaven, either. You will not know fresh air and flying. ~ Lauren Oliver

This woman who wants to lead a revolution for love and doesn't even acknowledge her own daughter ~ Lauren Oliver

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. ~ Lauren Oliver

Shhh."my mother said She presses her lips to my forehead, strokes my hair, just like she used to when I was a child. I am a baby once again in her arms - helpless and needy. "I'm here now. ~ Lauren Oliver

So Dad was cured?" I don't know why I feel so disappointed. I didn't even remember him; he died of cancer when I was one.
"He was." A muscle twitches in my mom's jaw. "But there were times I felt ... There were times it seemed as though he could still feel it, just for a second. Maybe I only imagined it. It doesn't matter. I loved him anyway. He was very good to me."
reminds me that she is not just my mother, but a woman who has fought her whole life for something she has never truly experienced.
My dad was cured. And you can't love, not fully, unless you are loved in return.
It makes me ache for her, a feeling I hate and am somehow ashamed of. ~ Lauren Oliver

For a minute he stands there, looking at me, and I can tell that he knows why I'm crying, and he understands, and it's going to be all right. He opens his arms to me.
"Come here," he says quietly.
I can't move to him fast enough. I practically fall into him. He catches me and pulls me in tightly to his chest, and I let myself go again, let sobs run through me. He stands there with me and murmurs into my hair and kisses the top of my head and lets me cry over losing another boy, a boy I loved better. ~ Lauren Oliver

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

But maybe happiness isn't in the choosing. Maybe it's in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along. ~ Lauren Oliver

Because I think you're right. You can make a difference." He told me experiences were kind of like fate, and fate usually came in the form of a test. He told me fate liked to be worshiped. It liked to see us fall on out knees before it offered to help us up..." ♥ ~ Lauren Oliver

Because if it weren't for me, Lena and Alex would never have been caught at all.
I told on them.
I was jealous. ~ Lauren Oliver

I guess it was bound to happen eventually. I've always known it would. Everyone you trust, everyone you think you can count on, will eventually disappoint you. When left to their own devices, people lie and keep secrets and change and disappear, some behind a different face or personality, some behind a dense early morning fog, beyond a cliff. ~ Lauren Oliver

no glove, no love ~ Lauren Oliver

the distant cries of the seagulls ~ Lauren Oliver

With the cure, relationships are all the same, and rules and expectations are defined. Without the cure, relationships must be reinvented every day, languages constantly decoded and deciphered. Freedom is exhausting. ~ Lauren Oliver

Lena," he says at last. "I think your mother is alive. ~ Lauren Oliver

He looked at me like I was beautiful. ~ Lauren Oliver

Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray thee, Lord, my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,I pay thee, Lord, my soul to take. ~ Lauren Oliver

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. ~ Lauren Oliver

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. ~ Lauren Oliver

layers I've built over the past six months, past the fake Lena with her shell and her ID cards and ~ Lauren Oliver

the bright, clipped voice that all nurses seem to share, like it's part of their medical training. ~ Lauren Oliver

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. ~ Lauren Oliver

That's the problem with lies. They aren't solid. They melt, and seep, and leak into the truth. And sooner or later, everything's just a muddle. ~ Lauren Oliver

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. ~ Lauren Oliver

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

Letting go is easy: it's all downhill. ~ Lauren Oliver

It is a strange phrase, 'falling in love,'" said one of the princesses in the tower. Tears stood out on her cheeks, and even these were pretty, reflecting the blue sky above her. "It sounds like something you do accidentally, by yourself. But isn't someone else always to blame? They should call it strangling in love. Walloped in love. Knocked-out-of-nowhere in love. ~ Lauren Oliver

Po swirled upward from where it had been sitting, and floated over to the window. "When you go swimming and you put your head under the water," Po said, "and everything is strange and underwater-sounding, and strange and underwater-looking, you don't miss the air do you? You don't miss the above-water sounds and the above-water look. It's just different."
"True." Liesl was quiet for a moment. Then she added, "But I bet you'd miss it if you were drowning. I bet you'd really miss the air then. ~ Lauren Oliver

I wonder if this is how people get close: They heal each other's wounds. ~ Lauren Oliver

Your mother loved you. Do you understand? She loved you. She still loves you. She wanted you to be safe. ~ Lauren Oliver

I was glad when the invalids were executed ~ Lauren Oliver

Alex laughs softly. "After poetry," he says, leaning down to kiss me, "we move on to fairy tales. ~ Lauren Oliver

Yes, the world was very strange. But you had to walk through. That was the trick. You had to keep walking through, always, with your chin held high, the way she had passed through the tunnels of the underworld, with only the dim light of the lumpen to guide her. That was the other trick, the other truth: Light would come to you from unexpected places. ~ Lauren Oliver

He makes me feel like music ~ Lauren Oliver

I want this to be everything you want it to be." Leaning in, he smiles and says, "I want you to see your dream come to life. ~ Christina Lauren

For all the people who have infected me with amor deliria nervosa in the past
- you know who you are.
For the people who will infect me in the future
- I can't wait to see who you'll be.
And in both cases:
Thank you. ~ Lauren Oliver

Like I am Alice in the Wonderland and have gotten too big for the room. ~ Lauren Oliver

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. ~ Lauren Oliver

He speaks on, words washing over me, the way that sunlight skips over the surface of water and filters into the depths below, lighting up the darkness. I keep my eyes closed. Amazingly, I can still see the stars: whole galaxies blooming from nothing - pink and purple suns, vast silver oceans, a thousand white moons. ~ Lauren Oliver

We are all identical drips and drops of people, hovering, waiting to be tipped, waiting for someone to show us the way, to pour us down a path. ~ Lauren Oliver

I wander through the halls and the campus, thinking how strange it is that you can live your whole life in one place and never really look at it. ~ Lauren Oliver

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. ~ Lauren Oliver

In fact," I add, "if George Clooney is ever accepted into the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb, that activity is immediately getting added to my bucket list. "As in, 'Have you ever been George Clooneyed?'" Oliver asks. "Exactly. 'We went for a walk, and then George Clooneyed until around two. Good night. ~ Christina Lauren

We stay like that for a long time, side by side, holding hands, until the crickets, obeying the same ancient law that pulls the sun from the sky and throws the moon up after it, that strips autumn down to winter and pushes spring up afterward, obeying the law of closure and new beginnings, send their voices up from the silence, and sing. ~ Lauren Oliver

Is it even remotely, conceivably possible ~ Lauren Oliver

I feel an ache in my throat, but I manage to smile. Two conflicting desires go through me at the same time, each as sharp as a razorblade: I want to see you grow up and Don't ever change. ~ Lauren Oliver

If they really want us to be happy, they'd let us pick ourselves. ~ Lauren Oliver

All human eyes are useless. You see only what you expect to see, and nothing more; and what is the use of sight like that? ~ Lauren Oliver

Unhappiness is bondage; therefore, happiness is freedom. ~ Lauren Oliver

There were days I asked for it-prayed for it when I went to sleep. The belief that I would see you again, that I could find you-the hope for it-was the only thing that kept me going. ~ Lauren Oliver

I guess it's the same way trees grow around the very vines that are killing them, so they're strangled and sustained all at once. After a long time, even pain can be a comfort. ~ Lauren Oliver

That's my favorite thing about him. I like to lie next to him when it's late, dark, and so quiet I can hear my own heartbeat. It's times like that when I'm sure that I'm in love. ~ Lauren Oliver

Alex, please."
He balls his fists. "Stop saying my name. You don't know me anymore."
"I do know you." I'm still crying, swallowing back spasms in my throat, struggling to breathe. This is a nightmare and I will wake up. This is a monster-story, and he has come back to me a terror-creation, patched together, broken and hateful, and I will wake up and he will be here, and whole, and mine again. I find his hands, lace my fingers through his even as he tries to pull away. "It's me, Alex. Lena. Your Lena. Remember? Remember 37 Brooks, and the blanket we used to keep in the backyard - "
"Don't," he says. His voice breaks on the word.
"And I always beat you in Scrabble," I say. I have to keep talking, and keep him here, and make him remember. "Because you always let me win. And remember how we had a picnic one time, and the only thing we could find from the store was canned spaghetti and some green beans? And you said to mix them - "
"Don't."
"And we did, and it wasn't bad. We ate the whole stupid can, we were so hungry. 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." I'm gasping, feeling as though I am about to drown; I'm reaching for him blindly, grabbing at his collar.
"Stop." He grabs my shoulders. His face is an inch from mine but unrecognizable: a gross, contorted mask. "Just stop. No more. It's done, okay? That's all done now."
"Alex, please - "
"Stop!" His v ~ Lauren Oliver

Tonight the man in the moon looks as though he's winking, or smirking: a moon with secrets. ~ Lauren Oliver

As soon as I look up, his eyes click onto my face. The breath whooshes out of my body and everything freezes for a second, as though I'm looking at him through my camera lens, zoomed in all the way, the world pausing for that tiny span of time between the opening and closing of the shutter. ~ Lauren Oliver

Up and down, up and down, a ladder of choices leading to the next choice, and the next, until suddenly you've run out of choices, and ladder, and you find time as rare and thin as air on a mountain. Then it's oops, sorry, turn's over. ~ Lauren Oliver

Every choice is limited,' I snap. 'That's life. ~ Lauren Oliver