Lauren Oliver, Requiem Quotes

Live free or die.

Perfection is a promise, and a reassurance that we are not wrong.

He is no longer mine to lose, but the grief is there, a gnawing sense of disbelief.

We wanted the freedom to love. We wanted the freedom to choose. Now we have to fight for it.

I put my forehead on his collarbone, place one hand on his chest. Its rhythm reassures me: He is real, and he is now.

And you can't love, not fully, unless you are loved in return.

This is not the person I wanted to become: Hatred has carved a permanent place inside me, a hollow where things are so easily lost.

We are all punished for the lives we have chosen, in one way or another.

That is the rule of the Wilds: You must be bigger and stronger and tougher. You must hurt or be hurt.

This is the past: It drifts, it gathers. If you are not careful, it will bury you.

For a second, I feel a sense of overwhelming grief: for how things change, for the fact that we can never go back. I'm not certain of anything anymore. I don't know what will happen--

I don't understand how everything changes, how the layers of your life get buried. Impossible. At some point, at some time, we must all explode.

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.

Please understand. Please forgive me.I prayed every day for you to be alive, until hope became painful.Don't hate me.I still love you.

He believed in people. He believed that if people could only be shown the right way-the way to health and order, a way to be free of unhappiness-they would make the right choice. They would obey.

Take down the walls.

She lives for this-the fight, the battle for survival. She actually enjoys it.

Power isn't free. Energy isn't free. It has to be earned.

An eye for an eye." "And the whole world goes blind, " Coral puts in quietly.

I think of the quietness of Julian’s voice as he said I love you, the steadiness of his rib cage rising and falling against my back, as we sleep.I love you, Julian. But the words don’t come.

Let me tell you something about dying: it's not as bad as they says.it's the coming-back-to-life part that hurts.