We wanted the freedom to love. We wanted the freedom to choose. Now we have to fight for it.
Lauren OliverHere's something else you might as well learn now: If you want something, if you take it for your own, you'll always be taking it from someone else. That's a rule too. And something must die so that others can live.
Lauren OliverThis is the world we live in, a world of safety and happiness and order, a world without love. A world where children crack their heads on stone fireplaces and nearly gnaw off their tongues and the parents are concerned. Not heartbroken, frantic, desperate. Concerned, as they are when you fail mathematics, as they are when they are late to pay their taxes.
Lauren OliverI can admit, now, that I must have loved Lena. Not in an Unnatural way, but my feelings for her must have been a kind of sickness. How can someone have the power to shatter you to dust--and also to make you feel so whole?
Lauren OliverIt was as though the darkness was a sheet of raw cookie dough and someone had just taken a cookie cutter and made a child-sized shape out of it.
Lauren OliverI remember Lena's expression when he knocked on the door; and how Alex had looked at her when she finally let him into the storeroom. I remember exactly what he was wearing, too, and the mess of his hair, the sneakers with their blue-tinged laces. His right shoe was untied. He didn't notice. He didn't notice anything but Lena.
Lauren Oliver