Lauren Oliver Quotes & Sayings

He who leaps for the sky may fall, it's true. But he may also fly. — Lauren Oliver

If he were less well trained, and less careful, he would say hate. But he can't say it; it is too close to passion, and passion is too close to love, and love is amor deliria nervosa, the deadliest of all deadly things: It is the reason for the games of pretend, for the secret selves, for the spasms in the throat. — Lauren Oliver

Animals, I think. We're animals. — Lauren Oliver

Anything, anything is possible, if you can just see the sky. — Lauren Oliver

As we pull out of the parking lot, it occurs to me that maybe it's not so complicated at all. 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.
And very, very rarely - by some miracle of chance and coincidence, butterflies beating their wings just so and all the threads hanging together for a minute - you get the chance to do the right thing. — Lauren Oliver

Even the greatest movements on earth, have their beginnings with something small. — Lauren Oliver

When I got home, my roof was gone. Overnight the weight of the snow became too much to carry. What tipped the scale? Think about it: there must have been a final snowflake that did it, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a milligram that made all the difference. — Lauren Oliver

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

I remember something Mrs. Harbor once said on one of her crazy tangents in English: that Plato believed that the whole world - everything we can see - was just like shadows on a cave wall. We can't actually see the real thing, the thing that's casting the shadow in the first place. — Lauren Oliver

But for now, the future, like the past, means nothing. For now, there is only a homestead built of trash and scraps, at the edge of a broken city, just beyond a towering city dump; and our arrival-hungry, and half-frozen, to a place of food and water and walls that keep out the brutal winds. This, for us, is heaven. — Lauren Oliver

dozens of them, all heads and arms and screaming mouths - pour — Lauren Oliver

She's the kind of person who makes you feel drunk just by being around her, like suddenly the world's edges are dulled and all of the colors are spinning together. — Lauren Oliver

It's the rule of the wilds. You must be bigger, and stronger, and tougher. A coldness radiates through me, a solid wall that is growing, piece by piece, in my chest. He doesn't love me. He never loved me. It was all a lie. "The old Lena is dead." I say, and then push past him. Each step is more difficult than the last; the heaviness fills me and turns my limbs to stone. You must hurt or be hurt. — Lauren Oliver

I close my eyes. An image flashes - emerging from the van with Julian after our escape from New York City; believing, in that moment, that we had escaped the worst, that life would begin again for us.
Instead life has only grown harder. — Lauren Oliver

It strikes me how small everything is, our whole world, everything with a meaning - our stores and our raids and our jobs and our lives, even. Meanwhile the world just goes on the same as always, night cycling into day and back into night, an endless circle; seasons shifting and reforming like a monster shaking off its skin and growing up again. — Lauren Oliver

Are you sure that being like everyone else will make you happy? — Lauren Oliver

Most of us won't see one another after graduation, and even if we do it will be different. We'll be different. We'll be adults
cured, tagged and labeled and paired and identified and placed neatly on our life path, perfectly round marbles set to roll down even, well-defined slopes. — Lauren Oliver

Another day bleeds out on the horizon, red and pink and gold; staring up at the sky. — Lauren Oliver

Love obeys no laws — Lauren Oliver

And yet there were times when I felt my life full of such richness, such fullness, I couldn't express it, couldn't speak or breathe a word because I feared the disruption
even a single breath could ruin it, like wind over a pond. I didn't want even a ripple. — Lauren Oliver

My mind is on autopilot and my thoughts are a million miles away — Lauren Oliver

I hate both of my parents right now: for sitting quietly in our house, while out in the darkness my heart was beating away all of the seconds of my life, ticking them off one by one until my time was up; for letting the thread between us stretch so far and so thin that the moment it was severed for good they didn't even feel it. — Lauren Oliver

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

It's amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast. — Lauren Oliver

Everything else is nothing. — Lauren Oliver

They say that just before you die your whole life flashes before your eyes, but that's not how it happened for me. — Lauren Oliver

Won't go wrong." Hana stands up and stares at me for a moment. "I promise," she says slowly, giving each word weight, "that everything will go perfectly. — Lauren Oliver

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. — Lauren Oliver

What glitters may not be gold; and even wolves may smile; and fools will be led by promises to their deaths. — Lauren Oliver

The mark of the procedure. A real one.
Lu is cured. — Lauren Oliver

She fell in love with men who would not have her or could not keep her. — Lauren Oliver

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. — Lauren Oliver

There's always some relief in giving up. — Lauren Oliver

The thing is, you don't get to know. It's not like you wake up with a bad feeling in your stomach. You don't see shadows where there shouldn't be any. You don't remember to tell your parents you love them or
in my case
remember to say good-bye to them at all. — Lauren Oliver

Do you ever think about him? About the boy who infected you?"
Images flash in the darkness: a crown of auburn hair, like autumn leaves burning; the blur of a body, a shape running next to me; a dream-figure. "I try not to," I say.
"Why not?" Julian's voice is quiet.
I say, "Because it hurts. — Lauren Oliver

I wonder what Lena is doing now. I always wonder what Lena is doing. Rachel, too: both my girls, my beautiful, big-eyed girls. But I worry about Rachel less. Rachel was always harder than Lena, somehow. More defiant, more stubborn, less feeling . Even as a girl, she frightened me - fierce and fiery-eyed, with a temper like my father's once was.
But Lena . . . little darling Lena, with her tangle of dark hair and her flushed, chubby cheeks. She used to rescue spiders from the pavement to keep them from getting squashed; quiet, thoughtful Lena, with the sweetest lisp to break your heart. To break my heart: my wild, uncured, erratic, incomprehensible heart. I wonder whether her front teeth still overlap; whether she still confuses the words pretzel and pencil occasionally; whether the wispy brown hair grew straight and long, or began to curl.
I wonder whether she believes the lies they told her. — Lauren Oliver

This was what true fear was
that you could never know other people, not completely. That you were always just guessing blind. — Lauren Oliver

I am five feet two inches tall and I am in-between in every way. But — Lauren Oliver

The old Lena is dead, — Lauren Oliver

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. — Lauren Oliver

We talked about how terrible the natural world could be. Of course, the bamboo is only doing what it must. Everything obeys it's own inner laws. Everything is greedy and moving toward a version of light. — Lauren Oliver

Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge. That's what it is: an edge; a razor. It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away on either side. — Lauren Oliver

I don't know how i stay on my feet, why i don;t just shatter into dust right there, why my heart keeps beating when i want it so badly to stop — Lauren Oliver

Despite the fact that Raven and Tack are often fighting, it's impossible to imagine one without the other. They are like two plants that have grown around each other - they strangle and squeeze and support at the same time. — Lauren Oliver

It does seem like the chocolate brings good luck. — Lauren Oliver

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 Oliver

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. — Lauren Oliver

I suppose that's the secret, if you're ever wishing for things to go back to the way they were. You just have to look up. THROUGH — Lauren Oliver

We'll go." Her voice is surprisingly deep and forceful. Set in her sunken, shipwreck face, her eyes burn like two smoldering coals. "We'll fight. — Lauren Oliver

The sky doesn't set so much as break apart. The horizon is brick-coloured. The rest of the sky is streaked with shock-red tendrils. — Lauren Oliver

I've known time to stretch out like rings expanding outward over water; I've also known it to rush by with such force it leaves me dizzy. But until today I've never known it to do both at the same time. The minutes seem to swell around me, to stifle me with their sluggishness ... At the same time. I'm terrified when I see how many hours have gone by ... and even as each minute seems to take an hour, each hour seems to fly by in a minute. — Lauren Oliver

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

I'm sorry for everything. Then he turns and pushes back into the woods, and he's gone. — Lauren Oliver

Still, the idea continued to drum through her, like the constant patter of the rain: that no one would ever love her. — Lauren Oliver

I'm sure I look like a disaster, — Lauren Oliver

I'll find you," he says, watching me with the eyes I remember. "I won't let you go again — Lauren Oliver

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. — Lauren Oliver

I love you. Remember. They cannot take it — Lauren Oliver

Her fierce and fearful friend
who loved country music and cherry Pop Tarts and singing in public and the color pink, who was terrified of germs and dogs and ladders. — Lauren Oliver

I knew it the moment I saw the scar, saw the flatness behind her eyes, like a pool that has lost all its depth.
Either she doesn't detect the challenge or she chooses to ignore it. — Lauren Oliver

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). — Lauren Oliver

I'm used to a feeling of doubleness, of thinking one thing and having to do another, a constant tug-of-war. — Lauren Oliver

Both of us will die today, gunned down or smashed up or exploded in some terrible moment of fire and twisted metal, and when they go to bury us we'll be so melted together and entwined they won't be able to separate the bodies; pieces of him will go with me, and pieces of me will go with him. — Lauren Oliver

I keep having the urge to cross my hands over my chest, to cover up my breasts, to hide. I'm suddenly aware of how pale I look in the sunshine, and how many moles I have spotting up and down my chest, and I just know he's looking at me thinking i'm wrong or deformed. But the he breathes, 'Beautiful' and when his eyes meet mine I know that he really, truly means it. — Lauren Oliver

His eyes are the color of honey. These are the eyes I remember from my dreams. — Lauren Oliver

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. — Lauren Oliver

A name that brings a taste of sunshine, and of sunshine raising mist from the trees, and of mist reaching toward the sky. — Lauren Oliver

And you should hear the music. Incredible, amazing music, like nothing you've ever heard, music that almost takes your head off, you know? That makes you want to scream and jump up and down and break stuff and cry ... — Lauren Oliver

You can't judge a book by its steel-toed combat boots. — Lauren Oliver

Are you sure that being like everybody else will make you happy?"
"I don't know any other way."
"Let me show you."
And then we're kissing. Or at least, I think we're kissing - I've only seen it done a couple of times, quick closed-mouth pecks at weddings or on formal occasions. But this isn't like anything I've ever seen, or imagined, or even dreamed: this is like music or dancing but better than both. — Lauren Oliver

-"your nocturna will never take another human, not for all the length of time in the universe and beyond. Your nocturna is wedded to your soul. Some even say" ... "that it is the nocturni who carry souls into the Shadow World when we die, where they will keep watch over them and keep them safe forever. Some say that is nocturni's ultimate purpose. — Lauren Oliver

The details that are my life's special pattern, like how in handwoven rugs what really makes them unique are the tiny flaws in the stitching, little gaps and jumps and stutters that can never be reproduced. — Lauren Oliver

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. — Lauren Oliver

Lyra and Caelum: the two replicas with names plucked straight from the stars. — Lauren Oliver

For a minute he stands there, looking at me, and I can tell that he knows why I'm crying, and he understands, and it's going to be all right. He opens his arms to me.
"Come here," he says quietly.
I can't move to him fast enough. I practically fall into him. He catches me and pulls me in tightly to his chest, and I let myself go again, let sobs run through me. He stands there with me and murmurs into my hair and kisses the top of my head and lets me cry over losing another boy, a boy I loved better. — Lauren Oliver

At a certain point your brain stops to rationalize things. At a certain point it gives up, shuts off, shuts down. — Lauren Oliver

Alex loved books. He was the one who first introduced me to poetry. That's another reason I can't read anymore. — Lauren Oliver

The way I figure it, life's the sum total of all our small mistakes, little tragedies, bad choices. — Lauren Oliver

When I'm running, there's always this split second when the pain is ripping through me and I can hardly breathe and all I see is color and blur - and in that split second, right as the pain crests, and becomes too much, and there's a whiteness going through me, I see something to my left, a flicker of color [ ... ] - and I know then, too, that if I only turn my head he'll be there, laughing, watching me, and holding out his arms.
I don't ever turn my head to look, of course. But one day I will. One day I will, and he'll be back, and everything will be okay.
And until then: I run. — Lauren Oliver

For a second something deep and old rises inside me and I could fall on the ground and weep for joy, or open up my arms and spin. After being enclosed for so long, I want to drink in all the space, all the bright, empty air stretching around me on all sides. — Lauren Oliver

Alex is dead, do you hear me? All of that-what we felt, what it meant- that's done now, okay? Buried. Blown away. — Lauren Oliver

This woman who wants to lead a revolution for love and doesn't even acknowledge her own daughter — Lauren Oliver

Mmm, butt bagels." Elody reaches into the bag and pulls out a bagel, half squashed, then makes a big deal of taking an enormous bite out of it. "Taste like Victoria's Secret."
"Taste like thong floss," I say.
"Taste like crack," Lindsay says.
"Taste like fart," Elody says, and Lindsay spits coffee on the dashboard, and I start laughing and can't stop, and all the way to school we're thinking of flavors for butt bagels, and I'm thinking that this
my life, my friends
might be weird or screwy or imperfect or damaged or whatever, but it's never seemed better to me. — Lauren Oliver

It's for the best. But no matter how many times I repeat it, the strange, hollow feeling in my stomach doesn't go away. And ridiculous as it is, I can't shake the persistent, needling feeling that I've forgotten something, or missed something, or lost something forever. — Lauren Oliver

If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging at your back and running its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do - the only thing - is run. In — Lauren Oliver

This music ebbs and flows, irregular, sad. It reminds me, weirdly, of watching the ocean during a bad storm, the lashing, crashing waves and the spray of sea foam against the docks; the way it takes your breath away, the power and the hugeness of it.
That's exactly what happens as I listen to the music, as I come up over the final crest of hill, and the half-ruined barn and collapsing farmhouse fan out in front of me, just as the music swells, a wave about to break: The breath leaves my body all at once, and I'm struck dumb by the beauty of it. For a second it seems to me like I really am looking down at the ocean - a sea of people, writhing and dancing in the light spilling down from the barn like shadows twisting up around a flame. — Lauren Oliver

I am falling, tumbling through the air, but this time the darkness is alive around me, full of beating things, and I realize that I'm not surrounded by dark but have only had my eyes closed all this time. I open them, feeling silly, and at the same time a hundred thousand butterlies take off around me, so many of them in so many brilliant colors they are like a solid rainbow, temporarily obscuring the sun. But as they wing higher and higher they reveal a landscape below us, all green and gold and sun-drenched fields and pink-tinged clouds drifting underneath me, and the air around me is clear and blue and sweet smelling, and I'm laughing, laughing, laughing as I spin through the air because, of course, I haven't been falling all the time.
I've been flying. — Lauren Oliver

It's a bummer in some ways, since she never surprises me by making up my sheets anymore, or leaving folded laundry or a new sundress on my bed like she did when I was in middle school. But at least I know she's not rooting through my drawers while I'm at school, looking for drugs or sex toys or whatever. — Lauren Oliver

I have a beautiful pair of Giuseppe Zanotti black pumps that make me feel like a model every time I put them on. I have a pair of Jimmy Choo flats I would marry, if I could. — Lauren Oliver

My heart is drumming in my chest so hard it aches, but it's the good kind of ache, like the feeling you get on the first real day of autumn, when the air is crisp and the leaves are all flaring at the edges and the wind smells just vaguely of smoke - like the end and the beginning of something all at once. — Lauren Oliver

Take down the walls — Lauren Oliver

Until, one day, she wasn't. — Lauren Oliver

Why do you flirt with Mr. Daimler? He's a perv, you know."
I'm so surprised by the question it takes me a second to answer. "Mr. Daimler is not a perv."
"Trust me, he is."
"Jealous?"
"Hardly."
"I don't flirt with him, anyway."
Kent rolls his eyes. "Sure."
I shrug my shoulders. "Why so interested?"
Kent goes red and drops his eyes to the floor. "No reason," he mumbles. — Lauren Oliver

Funny how people could be around you for so many years, and be so off the mark. — Lauren Oliver

We're on the other side of the fence now, Lena,' she says, tiredly, as she passes. Don't you get it? You can't tell me what to feel. — Lauren Oliver

This is what hatred is. It will feed you and at the same time turn you to rot. — Lauren Oliver

She liked that word: we. It sounded warm and open, like a hug. — Lauren Oliver

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

This is pretty much the answer to every problem you encounter in suburbia: plant a tree, and hope you don't see anyone's privates. — Lauren Oliver

That's okay," she says at last, returning her gaze to the fire. "He was still in love with you, anyway. — Lauren Oliver