Delirium Lauren Oliver Quotes & Sayings

For all the people who have infected me with amor deliria nervosa in the past
- you know who you are.
For the people who will infect me in the future
- I can't wait to see who you'll be.
And in both cases:
Thank you. — Lauren Oliver

As soon as she sees me she swings forward and hits a key on her keyboard. The music cuts off instantly. Strangely, the silence that follows seems just as loud. — Lauren Oliver

This is one symptom of the deliria no one ever tells you about: Apparently the disease turns you into a world-class liar. — Lauren Oliver

I know the rules. I've been living here longer than you have."
He cracks a smile then. He nudges me back. "Hardly."
"Born and raised. You're a transplant." I nudge him again, a little harder, and he laughs and tries to catch hold of my arm. I squirm away, giggling, and he stretches out to tickle my stomach. "Country bumpkin!" I squeal, as he grabs out and wrestles me back onto the blanket, laughing.
"City slicker," he says, rolling over on top of me, and then kisses me. Everything dissolves: heat, explosions of color, floating. — Lauren Oliver

Most things, even the greatest moments on earth, have their beginnings in something small. An earthquake that shatters a city might begin with a tremor, a tremble, a breath. Music begins with a vibration. — Lauren Oliver

Who knows? Maybe they're right. Maybe we are driven crazy by our feelings. Maybe love is a disease, and we would be better off without it.
But we have chosen a different road. And in the end that is the point of escaping the cure: We are free to choose.
We are even free to choose the wrong thing. — Lauren Oliver

It's like there's a glass wall between us now, invisible but impenetrable — Lauren Oliver

The idea - the fact of it, the fact that he even noticed and thought about me for more than one second - is huge and overwhelming, makes my legs go tingly and my hands feel numb. — Lauren Oliver

And even though I'm standing in the middle of the biggest crowd I've ever seen in my life, I suddenly feel very alone. — Lauren Oliver

The butterflies are working their way up from my stomach into my head, making me feel dizzy, and I try to calm myself by imagining the ocean outside, its ragged breathing, the seagulls turning pinwheels in the sky.
It will be over soon, I tell myself. It will be over soon and then you'll go home, and you'll never have to think about the evaluation again. — Lauren Oliver

The walls are covered -crammed- with writing. No. Not writing. They are covered with a single four-letter word that has been inscribed over and over, on every available surface.
Love. — Lauren Oliver

I told you," he whispers back. I can feel his breath just tickling the space behind my ear, making my hair prick up on my neck. "I like you."
"You don't know me," I say quickly.
"I want to, though. — Lauren Oliver

With 'Delirium,' I had to spend time thinking about the political, social and religious structure of a different world. But it was a fun challenge. — Lauren Oliver

Everywhere he touches is fire. My whole body is burning up, the two of us becoming twin points of the same bright white flame. — Lauren Oliver

I tear down Baxter, which loops around the last mile down to Back Cove.
And then I stop short. The buildings have fallen away behind me, giving way to ramshackle sheds, sparsely situated on either side of the cracked and run-down road. Beyond that, a short strip of tall, weedy grass slants down toward the cove.
The water is an enormous mirror, tipped with pink and gold from the sky. In that single, blazing moment as I come around the bend, the sun - curved over the dip of the horizon like a solid gold archway - lets out its final winking rays of light, shattering the darkness of the water, turning everything white for a fraction of a second, and then falls away, sinking, dragging the pink and the red and the purple out of the sky with it, all the color bleeding away instantly and leaving only dark.
Alex was right. It was gorgeous - one of the best I've ever seen. — 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

See?" my mother would say, smiling at me and my sister, Carol, in turn. "We live in the greatest country on earth. See how lucky we are?"
And yet the ash continued swirling down, and the smells of death came through the windows, crept under the door, hung in our carpets and curtains, and screamed of her lie.
Is it possible to tell the truth in a society of lies? Or must you always, of necessity, become a liar?
And if you lie to a liar, is the sin somehow negated or reversed?
These are the kinds of questions I ask myself now: in these dark, watery hours, when night and day are interchangeable. No. Not true. — Lauren Oliver

Mama, Mama, put me to bed
I won't make it home, I'm already half-dead
I met an Invalid, and fell for his art
He showed me his smile, and went straight for my heart. — Lauren Oliver

When I can no longer go forward, even by an inch, I lay my head on the ground and wait to die. I'm too tired to be frightened. Above me is blackness, and all around me is blackness, and the forest sounds are a symphony to sing me out of this world. I am already at my funeral. — Lauren Oliver

You can't cheat if there are no rules — Lauren Oliver

I wish I could close my eyes and be
blown into dust and nothingness, feel all my thoughts disperse like dandelion fluff drifting off on the wind. — Lauren Oliver

How can someone have the power to shatter you to dust
and also to make you feel so whole? — Lauren Oliver

Strains of music spring up, crystallizing in the night air like rain turning suddenly to snow, drifting to earth. — 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

Things weren't always as good as they are now. In school we learned that in the old days, the dark days, people didn't realize how deadly a disease love was.
For a long time they even viewed it as a good thing, something to be celebrated and pursued. Of course that's one of the reasons it's so dangerous: It affects your mind so that you cannot think clearly, or make rational decisions about your own well-being. (That's symptom number twelve, listed in the amor deliria nervosa section of the twelfth edition of The Safety, Health, and Happiness Handbook, or The Book of Shhh, as we call it.) Instead people back then named other diseases - stress, heart disease, anxiety, depression, hypertension, insomnia, bipolar disorder - never realizing that these were, in fact, only symptoms that in the majority of cases could be traced back to the effects of amor deliria nervosa. — Lauren Oliver

I like you.
You don't know me.
I want to, though. — Lauren Oliver

This is what I want. This is the only thing I've ever wanted. Everything else - every single second of every single day that has come before this very moment, this kiss - has meant nothing. — Lauren Oliver

What's poetry? I've never heard the word before, but I like the sound of it. It sounds elegant and easy, somehow, like a beautiful woman turning in a long dress. — Lauren Oliver

I said, I prefer the ocean when it's gray. Or not really gray. A pale, in-between color. It reminds me of waiting for something good to happen. — Lauren Oliver

With the same people who had never dreamed their way out of here. — Lauren Oliver

This is the strange way of the world, that people who simply want to love are instead forced to become warriors. — Lauren Oliver

Amazing, how hope lives. Without air or water, with hardly anything at all to nurture it. — 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

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

All I can think is: I need air. The rest of my thoughts are a blur of radio static and fluorescent lights and lab coats and steel tables and surgical knives — Lauren Oliver

He is my world and my world is him and without him there is no world. — Lauren Oliver

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

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

Sometimes I feel like if you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you - sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever. — Lauren Oliver

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

It is war now, and armies need symbols. — 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

Lord, help us root our feet to the earth
And our eyes to the road
And always remember the fallen angels
Who, attempting to soar,
Were seared instead by the sun and, wings melting,
Came crashing back to the sea.
Lord, help root my eyes to the earth
And stay my eyes to the road
So I may never stumble.
-Psalm 24 (From "Prayer and Study," The Book of Shhh) — Lauren Oliver

The pain in my lungs swells up and blossoms until it feels like it's everywhere, tearing through all my cells and muscles at once. The cramp in my leg makes me wince every time my heel hits the pavement. It's always like this on miles two and three, like all the stress and anxiety and irritation and fear get transformed into little needling points of physical pain, and you can't breathe or imagine going farther or think anything but: I can't. I can't. I can't. — Lauren Oliver

Everything has taken on a strange, distant quality - the sounds of running and shouting outside get warped and weird like they're being filtered through water, and Alex looks miles away. I start to think I might be dreaming, or about to pass out.
And then I decide I'm definitely dreaming, because as I'm watching, Alex starts peeling his shirt off over his head. — Lauren Oliver

I feel as though I'm in a dream, where strange things are happening but they don't feel strange. Everything is cloudy - everything is wrapped in a fog - and I'm filled from head to toe with the single, burning desire to get closer to the music, to hear the music better, for the music to go on and on and on. — 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

Everything looks stark and vivid and frozen, as though drawn precisely and outlined in ink - parents' smiles frozen, camera flashes blinding, mouths open and white teeth glinstening, dark glossy hair and deep blue sky and unrelenting light, everyone drowning in light - everything so clear and perfect I'm sure it must already be a memory, or a dream. — Lauren Oliver

Love and desire enjoy a symbiotic relationship, meaning that one cannot exist without the other. Desire is an enemy to contentment; desire is illness, a feverish brain. Who can be considered healthy who wants? The very word want suggests a lack, an impoverishment, and that is what desire is: an impoverishment of the brain, a flaw, a mistake. — Lauren Oliver

I'd rather die on my own terms than live on theirs. I'd rather die loving Alex than live without him. — Lauren Oliver

I love you. Remember. And someday, I will find you again. — Lauren Oliver

Every day, streets papered with more and more for .
Reward, reward, reward.
Reward for information.
If you see something, say something.
A paper town, a paper world: paper rustling in the airm whispering to me, hissing out a message of posion and jealousy.
If you know something, do something.
I'm sorry, Lena. — Lauren Oliver

So many questions crowd my brain at once, it's like one of the famous Portland fogs has swept up from the ocean and settled there, making it impossible to think normal, functional thoughts. We're sitting on the floor of the living room, which is squashed up right next to the "dining room", and I'm holding Jenny's workbook on my knees, reciting the problems to her, but my mind is on autopilot and my thoughts are a million miles away. Or rather, they're exactly 3.4 miles away, down at the marshy edge of Back Cove. — Lauren Oliver