Lauren Oliver Quotes

Maybe all of these different possibilities exist at the same time, like each moment we live has a thousand other moments layered underneath it that look different.

Fourth period I have "life skills", which is what they call gym when you're old enough to be offended by forced physical activity (Elody thinks they should call it slavery instead, for accuracy).

So are you going to be my knight in shining armor or what?' Kent does a little bow. 'You know I can't resist a damsel in distress.

Maybe before you die, it's your ghosts you see.

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.

No guest rooms.” I shake my head resolutely. “I want to be in a room room. A lived-in room.

Nothing has ever been so painful or delicious as being so close to him and being unable to do anything about it: like eating ice cream so fast on a hot day you get a splitting headache.

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.

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.

This is one of my favorite things about the Underground: the crashing of the cymbals, the screeching guitar riffs, music that moves into the blood and makes you feel hot and wild and alive.

Finishing books - and leaving the world you've created - is always a kind of emotionally wrenching experience. I usually cry.

An itchy feeling began to work its way through my body, as though a thousand mosquitoes were circulating through my blood, biting me from the inside, making me want to scream, jump, squirm. I ran.

My first kiss. A new kind of kiss, like the new kind of music still playing, softly, in the distance - wild and arrhythmic, desperate. Passionate.

Chance. Stupid, dumb, blind chance. Just a part of the strange mechanism of the world, with its fits and coughs and starts and random collisions.

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

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

It won't matter if nobody ever thinks I'm pretty (although sometimes I wish, just for a second, that somebody would)

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

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

Every choice is limited. That's life.

I vowed after that day that I would be your hero too, no matter how long it took

I’ve never really had a party before.” “Why did you have one now?” I say, just to keep him talking. He gives a half laugh. “I thought if I had a party, you would come.

Lies are just stories, and stories are all that matter. We all tell stories. Some are more truthful than others, maybe, but in the end the only thing that counts is what you can make people believe.

There is only what you want and what happens. There is only grabbing on and holding tight in the darkness.

You should only fall in love with people who will fall in love with you back.

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

I feel a flash of grief so intense it almost makes me cry out: not for what I lost, but for the chances I missed.

Now, after so many years, I understand what the Coldness was and where it came from—this sense that everything is lost, and worthless, and meaningless.

Hunky Heroes, rescuing distressed women, captive princesses, and girls without wheels since 1684. p. 450

...into hate, into refusal, against hope and without fear

Don't worry about what you're writing or whether it's good or even whether it makes sense.

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.

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.

We'll walk together holding hands, and kiss in broad daylight, and love each other as much as we want to, and no one will ever try to keep up apart.

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

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--

It's not my fault I can't be like you, okay? I don't get up in the morning thinking the world is one big, shiny, happy place, okay? That's just not how I work. I don't think I can be fixed.

I used to think that's what love was: knowing someone so well he was like a part of you.

It's too late. I've seen things...I've lost things you can't understand.

He looked at me like I was beautiful.

I need to live my life in the light of their deaths. I need to live.

That’s what made it so frightening to the lawmakers: Love obeys no laws other than its own.

There are no happy endings, only breaks in the regular action.

His secret name, which belongs to me, and to him, and to no one else.

That's my favorite thing about him. I like to lie next to him when it's late, dark, and so quiet I can hear my own heartbeat. It's times like that when I'm sure that I'm in love.

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.

The sun has just risen, weak and watery-looking, like it had just spilled itself over the horizon and is too lazy to clean itself up.

Maybe this is the secret to talking to boys--maybe you just have to be angry all the time.

It's funny how you can know your friends so well, but you still end up playing the same games with them.

You can try to pin me down with a hundred thousand arms, but I will find a way to resist