Lauren DeStefano Quotes

I liked just being with you. I liked the way you breathed when you were asleep. I liked when you took the champagne glass from my hand. I liked how your fingers were always too long for your gloves.

Before I can process what’s happening, Deirdre has opened her hands and Linden has taken the ring from her and slipped it onto my finger. “Rhine Ashby,” he says. “My wife.

The thing about hope is that it doesn't go away even when it serves no purpose.

But I know all the things you're too sweet to know.

He kissed back, all the pages spread out around us like riddles waiting to be solved. Let them wait. Let my genes unravel, my hinges come loose. If my fate rests in the hands of a madman, let death come and bring its worse. I'll take the ruined craters of laboratories, the dead trees, this city with ashes in the oxygen, if it means freedom. I'd sooner die here than live a hundred years with wires in my veins.

It's best to let her go," he says. No, no, that's wrong. It's never right to give up on someone.

The months fall to shards at my feet.

You can try to please everyone and risk accomplishing nothing, or go for your dreams and risk pissing a few people off.

Tell freedom I said hello.

There is warmth shooting through my broken body where there should be pain, and I put my arms around the back of his neck and I hold on to him. I hold on because you never know in this place when something good will be taken away.

His three wives are huddled together on the bare mattress, one of them dying; when we're together, we form an alliance he can't touch. He's scared to even try.

The world seems so clean if you only looked up.

The madness of youth made me unafraid.

Times like this, when she slips her hand into mine and holds on tight, and our husband becomes just a shadow in the doorway.

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

I watch the ashes swim around like dandelion puffs, making swirls where bodies and walls once stood.

There are so many of us, so many girls. The world wants us for our wombs or our bodies, or it doesn't want us at all.

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.

It doesn't matter how much his mother loves him; love is not enough to keep any of us alive.

Home?' I say. It's a word that can mean anywhere and nowhere.

It's quiet for a while, and then Rowan says; "We could talk now. We're alone out here. No walls." "There are always walls." I say.

Maybe it is desperation. Maybe we can't let things fall apart without trying. We can't let go of the people we love.

He says one word, nodding into the daylight. "Look." It's an astounding word. It's a gift.

Dystopian, by definition, promises a darker story.

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.

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

There's a sort of dead passion in him. A spark that, had he more years to live, would be a wildfire.

Suddenly the clouds seem high above us. They’re moving over us in an arch, circling the planet. They have seen abysmal oceans and charred, scorched islands. They have seen how we destroyed the world. If I could see everything, as the clouds do, would I swirl around this remaining continent, still so full of color and life and seasons, wanting to protect it? Or would I just laugh at the futility of it all, and meander onward, down the earth’s sloping atmosphere?

I wanted so badly to tell him, but something about that entire night seemed so beautiful, so bizarre, that I didn't trust it with my secrets.

We are stronger than we've credited ourselves to be. We have been the victims and the witnesses. We have said a lifetime of good-byes.

I wanted to be rid of him," he says. He raises my chin with his thumb. "But not if it meant being rid of you. I climbed in beside you, and you put your head in my lap. You can't think I would have left you like that." "Look what it got you," I say. "Tea in bed and you here in front of me," he says. "It was a terrible decision, and I confess I'd make it again.

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

We accept gods that don't speak to us. We accept gods that would place us in a world filled with injustices and do nothing as we struggle. It's easier than accepting that there's nothing out there at all, and that, in our darkest moments, we are truly alone.

Someday I'll tell you all of it," I say. "I'd like that," he says. "No," I say. "I promise you won't.

Even things that aren't broken can be fixed.

Fate, I think, is a thief.

Linden just wants to protect her, is what I want to say. She's all he has. I left him. I'm at arms reach, but I've left him.

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.

Eventually I realize that I am holding on to him just as tightly as he holds on to me. And here we are: two small dying things, as the world ends around us like falling autumn leaves.

I'm suddenly finding it hard to know the difference between nightmares and consciousness.

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.

You've been captive for so long that you don't even realize you want freedom anymore.

For males twenty-five is the fatal age. For women it's twenty. We are all dropping like flies.

Cure" is one of the most precious words in the English language. It's a short word. A clean and simple word. But it isn't so easy a thing as it sounds. There are questions like: How will this affect us in ten years? In twenty? What will it do to our children? Our children's children?

Once upon a time there were two parents, two children, and a brick house with lilies in the yard. The parents died, the lilies wilted. One child disappeared. Then the other." Pg 225

I don't dare touch her. Loss is a knowledge I'm sorry to have. Perhaps the only thing worse than experiencing it, is watching it replay anew in someone else--all the awful stages picking up like a chorus that has to be sung.

I always knew I was an excellent liar; I just didn't know that I had it in me to fool myself.