Lauren DeStefano Quotes

And everywhere girls, tumbling from trees like orange blossoms and hitting the earth with sickening thuds. They crack open.

He sits next to me, careful to avoid my hair that's splayed out around my head like blood. A bullet to the forehead, boom, blond waves everywhere.

There's a world out there that nobody has bothered to promise her.

They never exhale, the trees; on a very windy day, they rustle and inhale, and then the leaves and the branches all tremble as though something means to strangle the life from them. The sky watches on. The world is filled with anticipation, as if to wonder if this day will be a great day, or a horrible day, or the last day.

I used to have only one name; it used to mean something.

My head is my favorite swimming pool.

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

Maybe hope isn't the most dangerous thing a person can have. Maybe love is.

We figure out what death means when we're born, practically, and we live our whole lives in some kind of weird denial about it.

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.

In another time, in another place, I wonder who they might have been.

Bet you never eat, he says. Bet you drink up the oxygen like it's butter. Bet you can go for days on nothing but thoughts.

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.

She’s a commodity in a sea of broken girls.

I've loved you since the day I stole the atlas for you," Gabriel says, because he thinks I'm asleep.

and I've always known it, the way I love a song I hear for the first time, even before I know all the words, the way I love my favorite color, and the way that the train would speed past my bedroom when it was very quiet and I'd feel it in my stomach rushing through me. I love you in a way that I've never felt needed to be said.

A feeling can't kill you.

Do you know what my father used to say?" I ask her. "He used to say that songs had a heart. A crescendo that can make all your blood rush from your head to your toes.

Set fire to the broken pieces; start anew.

Time was our very first king. We all live our lives to the aggressive ticking of the clock. We don't question that our lives are a grid of seconds; even our pulses oblige. No succeeding king can hope to hold this kind of power.

I like the idea of something greater than us. We destroy things with our curiosity. We shatter with our best intentions. We are no closer to perfection than we were one hundred years ago, or five hundred.

A party in the orange grove. The pain on Linden's face is immediate. I am unwavering. He has cost me more pain than I will ever be able to repay.

None of the wives mention the security guards by the door, who will probably tackle us to the ground if we try to leave without our husbands.

When we were first married, I thought he must have been the most heartless, hateful man I'd ever known, but he was just as much a prisonor as I was. Where Vaughn imprisoned me with walls, he imprisoned his son with ignorance.

You have a way of looking at things. You make it seem as though everything's going to be okay. I can't imagine a more dangerous thing to have than hope like yours.

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

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.

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.

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

Kettle thingies. Yum.

Humans are the absolute worst thing to happen to this planet.

Childhood is a long, long road, from which that dark whispering forest of death seems an impossible destination.

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.

There is no choice for him but to believe. He has nothing left to give in offering.

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

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

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.

What have you done? What have you given up?' So many things, Cecily. More than you know.

There's nothing here to say good-bye to. There's no dancing girl. No mischievous smile. She's gone, off with her sisters, broken free, escaped. And if she were here now, she would say, "Go.

I think humans have always been desperate. I think it has always been about doing something awful if it might help, when the only other option is death. Maybe that's what being a parent is supposed to feel like.

She's been conned, ruined, left for dead, and she's not going to forgive any of it. She will soldier on, if only out of spite.

I wonder if she has figured out that I'll never love Linden, especially not in the way she does, and that he'll never love anyone the way he loves her. I wonder if she realizes, despite all her efforts to train me, that I can never take her place.

Gabriel's voice can reach me anywhere. Even in a hurricane.

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

But there’s no such thing as free. There are only different and more horrible ways to be enslaved.

‎I have always been fascinated by the ocean, to dip a limb beneath its surface and know that I'm touching eternity, that it goes on forever until it begins here again.

No matter how lonely it makes me, and no matter how wide and horrific the loneliness, at least I remember who I am.

Forget who you are and what you think is there, and you'll discover things that don't exist to be known.