They haven't killed us yet," I say, and I imagine that one day I will fly a plane over Portland, over Rochester, over every fenced-in city in the whole country, and I will bomb and bomb and bomb, and watch all their buildings smoldering to dust, and all those people melting and bleeding into flame, and I will see how they like it. If you take, we will take back. Steal from us, and we will rob you blind. When you squeeze, we will hit. This is the way the world is made now.
Lauren OliverTime 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.
Lauren OliverThey couldnโt have known that even this was a lieโthat we never really choose, not entirely. 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 havenโt chosen at all. But maybe happiness isnโt in the choosing. Maybe itโs in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.
Lauren OliverWhat is beauty? Beauty is no more than a trick; a delusion; the influence of excited particles and electrons colliding in your eyes, jostling in your brain like a bunch of overeager school children, about to be released on break. Will you let yourself be deluded? Will you let yourself be decieved? -"On Beauty and Falsehood," The New Philosophy, by Ellen Dorpshire
Lauren Oliver