Lauren Oliver Quotes

It occurs to me that for a long time she has been doing her own version of resisting.

But you can build a future out of anything. A scrap, a flicker. The desire to go forward, slowly, one foot at a time. You can build an airy city out of ruins.

And then, just at that moment, when I'm no longer sure if I'm dreaming or awake or walking some valley in between where everything you wish for comes true, I feel the flutter of his lips on mine.

When we get out of highschool we'll look back and know we did everything right, that we kissed the cutest boys and went to the best parties, got in just enough trouble, listened to our music too loud, smoked too many cigarettes, and drank too much and laughed too much and listened too little, or not al all.

I'm not ugly but I'm not pretty either. Everything is in-between. I have eyes that aren't green or brown, but a muddle. I'm not thin but I'm not fat either. the only thing you could definitely say about me is that: I'm short

willing me to understand: that people should be sacrificed to causes, that beauty can be built on the backs of the dead.

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."

Now I'd rather be infected with love for the tiniest sliver of a second than live a hundred years smothered by a lie.

At the same time I know that it’s not really their fault, at least not completely. I did my part too. I did it on a hundred different days and in a thousand different ways, and I know it. But this makes the anger worse, not better.

Everytime he brushes me with his fingers, time seems to tether for a second, like it is in danger of dissolving. The whole world is dissolving, I decide, except for us. Us.

Once Mo had closed the gates, he returned to his little stone hut, and his half-eaten sandwich of butter and canned sardines, and his mug of thick hot chocolate, which every night he poured carefully into a thermos labeled COFFEE.

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.

Dystopian novels help people process their fears about what the future might look like; further, they usually show that there is always hope, even in the bleakest future.

Everyone you trust, everyone you think you can count on, will eventually disappoint you.

I am now officially married to Fred Hargrove. Nothing will ever be the same.

Raven has lost deeply, again and again, and she, too, has buried herself. There are pieces of her scattered all over. Her heart is nestled next to a small set of bones buried beside a frozen river, which will emerge with the spring thaw, a skeleton ship rising out of the water”.

I've learned to get really good at this - say one thing when I'm thinking about something else, act like I'm listening when I'm not, pretend to be calm and happy when I'm really freaking out. It's one of the skills you perfect as you get older

I guess there are some things you never get used to.

Some things are better left buried and forgotten.

Most things, even the greatest movements on earth, have their beginnings in something small. An earthquake that shatters a city might begin with a tremble, a breath. Music begins with a vibration . . . And God created the whole universe from an atom no bigger than a thought.

I 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.

Mistake, mistake, mistake. A strange word: stinging, somehow.

The house, the pond, the tree-it was all both overwhelmingly familiar and different from what she remembered-smaller and shabbier, somehow. It was like waking up to find that your reflection in the mirror had aged overnight, or had sprouted a new mole: You were forced to admit that things changed, whether you gave them permission to or not.

It's the time of the night I like best, when most people are asleep and it feels like the world belongs completely to my friends and me, as though nothing exists apart from out little circle: everywhere else is darkness and quiet.

The hours here are flat and round, disks of gray layered one on top of the other...they move slowly, at a grind, until it seems as though they are not moving at all. They are just pressing down.

I thought if I followed the rules, things would turn out all right. that's the thing about the cure, isn't it? It isn't just about deliria at all. It's about order. A path for everyone. You just have to follow it and everything will be okay. That's what the DFA is about. That's what I belevied in-what I've had to believe in. Because otherwise, it's just...chaos.

I was glad when the Invalids were executed. Some people complained that lethal injection was too humane for convicted terrorists, but I thought it sent a powerful message: We are not the evil ones. We are reasonable and compassionate. We stand for fairness, structure, and organization. It’s the other side, the uncureds, who bring the chaos.

This was what being cured was like: like being in a fishbowl, circling always inside the same glass.

"Everyone is asleep. They've all been asleep for years. You seemed... awake." Alex is whispering now. He closes his eyes, opens them again. "I'm tired of sleeping."

Old words; words that nearly brought me to my knees. Live free or die

It's so strange how life works: You want something and you wait and wait and feel like it's taking forever to come. Then it happens and it's over and all you want to do is curl back up in that moment before things changed.

Suicide. A sideways word, a word that people whisper and mutter and cough: a word that must be squeezed out behind cupped palms or murmured behind closed doors. It was only in dreams that I heard the word shouted, screamed.

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.

That's all I want. Just you and me. Always.

The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone.

There's always some relief in giving up.

And it's the funniest thing: as soon as I see it, the whistling in my ears stops and the feeling of terror drains away, and I realize this whole time I haven't been falling at all. I've been floating.

it's weird how much people change. for example, when i was a kid i loved all of these things..and over time all of them just fell away, one after another, replaced by friends and IMing and cell phones and boys and clothes. it's kind of sad, if you think about it. like there's no continuity in people at all. like something ruptures when you hit twelve, or thirteen, or whatever the age is when you're no longer a kid but a "young adult," and after that you're a totally different person. maybe even a less happy person. maybe even a worse one.

The reason you can never go home again isn't necessarily that places change, but people do. So nothing ever looks the same.

Most of the time-- 99 percent of the time-- you just don't know how and why the threads are looped together, and that's okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes.

It strikes me how strange people are. You can see them every day - you can think you know them - and then you fшnd out you hardly know them at all.

Everyone just wasting time because they have so much of it to waste, minutes slipping by on who's with who and did you hear.

But maybe you carried your demons with you everywhere, the way you carried your shadow.

That's what time does: We stand stubbornly like rocks while it flows all around us, believing that we are immutable - and all the time we're being carved, and shaped, and whittled away.

They couldn’t have known that even this was a lie—that 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 haven’t chosen at all. 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.

Most of the time one night blends into the next and weeks blend into weeks and months into other months. And sooner or later we all die. But at the beginning of the night anything’s possible.

And in that moment, the wordless thing passed between us, the thing that wasn't quite love but was so close I could believe in it sometimes.

And there it is: Even though we’re standing in the same patch of sun-drenched pavement, we might as well be a hundred thousand miles apart.