Lauren Oliver Love Quotes & Sayings

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

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. — Lauren Oliver

They told us that love was a disease. They told us it would kill us in the end. — Lauren Oliver

And then she left, and it broke my heart so completely I could hardly breathe. — Lauren Oliver

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

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

Love. I love you. I'll always love you, my love. You are the love of my life. — Lauren Oliver

An eternity of chocolate fountains and perfect love and guys who always call when they say they will and banana sundaes that actually help you burn calories. — Lauren Oliver

I remember that he split two maple-wing seeds and struck one on his nose and one on mine, telling me that this way everyone would know we were in love. — Lauren Oliver

Amor deliria nervosa isn't a disease of love. It's a disease of selfishness. — 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

It affects your mind so that you cannot think clearly, or make rational decisions about your own well-being. — Lauren Oliver

I love you. They can't take it away. — Lauren Oliver

So Dad was cured?" I don't know why I feel so disappointed. I didn't even remember him; he died of cancer when I was one.
"He was." A muscle twitches in my mom's jaw. "But there were times I felt ... There were times it seemed as though he could still feel it, just for a second. Maybe I only imagined it. It doesn't matter. I loved him anyway. He was very good to me."
reminds me that she is not just my mother, but a woman who has fought her whole life for something she has never truly experienced.
My dad was cured. And you can't love, not fully, unless you are loved in return.
It makes me ache for her, a feeling I hate and am somehow ashamed of. — Lauren Oliver

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

I guess that's just part of loving people: You have to give things up. Sometimes you even have to give them up. — Lauren Oliver

And we did, and it wasn't bad. We ate the whole stupid can, we were so hungry. And when it started to get dark you pointed to the sky, and told
me there was a star for every thing you loved about me. I'm gasping, feeling as though I am about to drown; I'm reaching for him blindly, grabbing at
his collar. — Lauren Oliver

Julian sucks in a deep breath. Then, all in a rush, he says, "I love you." Just as I blurt out, "Don't say it." There's another beat of silence. Julian looks startled. "What?" he finally says. I wish I could take the words back. I wish I could say I love you, too. But the words are caught in the cage of my chest. "Julian, you have to know how much I care about you." I try to touch him, and he jerks backward. "Don't," he says. — 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

It struck her how sad it was that all of them had grown up on top of one another like small animals in a too-small cage, and now would simply scatter. And that would be the end of that. Everything that had happened would be sucked away into memory and vapour, as though it hadn't even happened at all. — Lauren Oliver

Love can open like a flower out of even the hardest places. — 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

[S]he'd realized that he had loved her only because she belonged to him. — Lauren Oliver

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. — Lauren Oliver

And now I know why they invented words for love, why they had to: It's the only thing that can come close to describing what I feel in that moment, the baffling mixture of pain and pleasure and fear and joy, all running sharply through me at once. — 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

Over the past week, I've accepted that I will never love Julian as much as I loved Alex. But now that idea is overwhelming, like a wall between us. I will never love Julian like I love Alex. — Lauren Oliver

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

There has been significant debate in the scientific community about whether desire is a symptom of a system infected with amor deliria nervosa, or a pre-condition of the disease itself.
It is unanimously agreed, however, that love and desire enjoy a symbiotic relationship, meaning that one cannnot exist without the other. Desire is enemy to ncontentment; desire is illness, a feverish brain. Who can be considereed 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. Fortunately, that can now be corrected.
- From The Roots and Repercussions of Amor Deliria Nervosa on Cognitive Functioning, 4th edition, by Dr. Phillip Berryman — Lauren Oliver

Stop!" His voice rings out sharply, hard as a slap. He releases me and I stumble backward. "Alex is dead, do you hear me? All of that - what we felt, what it meant - that's done now, okay? Buried. Blown away."
"Alex!"
He has started to turn away; now he whirls around. The moon lights him stark white and furious, a camera image, two-dimensional, gripped by the flash. "I don't love you, Lena. Do you hear me? I never loved you."
The air goes. Everything goes. "I don't believe you." I'm crying so hard, I can hardly speak.
He takes one step toward me. And now I don't recognize him at all. He has transformed entirely, turned into a stranger. "It was a lie. Okay? It was all a lie. Craziness, like they always said. Just forget about it. Forget it ever happened. — Lauren Oliver

I start to follow her, and Alex grabs my hand.
"I'll find you," he says, watching me with the eyes I remember. "I won't let you go again."
I don't trust myself to speak. Instead I nod, hoping that he understands me. He squeezes my hand.
"Go," he says. — Lauren Oliver

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

I am tired of fighting, of hitting and being hit. This is the strange way of the world, that people who simply want to love are instead forced to become warriors. It's the upside-down nature of life. — Lauren Oliver

If Conrad remembered the skinny, frightened girl he'd held for one brief moment on a frigid Boston street corner, he showed no signs of it when we met
...
Even as I tried to urge hum back against the pillows, he looked at me with wild eyes.
"What happened to your leather jacket?" he asked.
"Shh," I said, trying to sooth him. "There's no leather jacket."
"You were wearing it the first time I saw you," he said, frowning slightly. — Lauren Oliver

I need him to know that somehow, at some point in the tunnels, I began to love him. Please. — Lauren Oliver

When you love someone, when you care for someone, you have to do it through the good and the bad. Not just when you're happy and it's easy. — 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

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

How did I love her?
Let me count the ways.
The freckles on her nose like the shadow of a shadow; the way she chewed on her lower lip when she walked and how when she ran she looked like she was born going fast and how she fit perfectly against my chest; her smell and the touch of her lips and her skin, which was always warm, and how she smiled.
Like she had a secret.
How she always made up words during Scrabble. Hyddym (secret music). Grofp (cafeteria food). Quaw (the sound a baby duck makes). How she burped her way through the alphabet once, and I laughed so hard I spat out soda through my nose.
And how she looked at me like I could save her from everything bad in the world.
This was my secret: she was the one who saved me. — Lauren Oliver

I could feel the heat from all the colored lights pressing down on me like a hand, and the music seemed to echo somewhere behind my ribs, making my heart flutter and skip in time. — Lauren Oliver

Somehow, the pain only makes it better, more intense, more worth it. — Lauren Oliver

Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love ya tomorrow. A beautiful word, when you really think about it. — Lauren Oliver

So much between us went unsaid; that is the danger, and beauty, of life without the cure. There is always wilderness and tangle, and the path is never clear. — Lauren Oliver

With the cure, relationships are all the same, and rules and expectations are defined. Without the cure, relationships must be reinvented every day, languages constantly decoded and deciphered. Freedom is exhausting. — Lauren Oliver

In one,Einstein is pictured over the words GRAVITY IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR FALLING IN LOVE. — Lauren Oliver

I think I'm able to do so much because writing is what I love to do. So, often when I have free time, I choose to write and edit. — 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

I don't love you, Lena. Do you hear me? I never love you. — Lauren Oliver

But from the beginning, I knew that in a world where destiny was dead, I was destined, forever, to love him. Even though he didn't - though he couldn't - ever love me back. — Lauren Oliver

You know what your problem is? You want everything to be shitty. You have a sister who loves you. Friends who love you. I love you, Heather. — 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

As my friend Oliver Platt used to say to me about hopes and dreams I'd share with him: 'It's coming, just not on your time frame. — Lauren Graham

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. — 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

All this time, I thought we were growing apart because I was leaving Lena behind. But really it was the reverse. She was learning to lie.
She was learning to love. — Lauren Oliver

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

Love is a kind of possession. It's a poison. — Lauren Oliver

Fear. Blame. Don't forget. Mom. I love you.
-Lauren Oliver, Delerium — Lauren Oliver

But that's the problem with love - it acts on you, works through you, resists your attempts to control. — Lauren Oliver

Love: It will kill you and save you, both — Lauren Oliver

There is no love, only disorder — 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

no glove, no love — 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

I let her stay a few feet ahead of me and try to memorize her exactly as she is: running, laughing, tan and happy and beautiful and mine; blond hair flashing in the last rays of sun like a torch, like a beacon of good things to come, and better days ahead for us both. — Lauren Oliver

Love obeys no laws other than its own. That's what always made it frightening. — 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

She is the only one who knows
of the Coldness: a feeling that comes sometimes when I'm
lying in bed, a black, empty feeling that knocks my breath
away and leaves me gasping as though I've just been
thrown in icy water. On nights like that - although it is wrong
and illegal - I think of those strange and terrible words, I
love you, and wonder what they would taste like in my
mouth, try to recall their lilting rhythm on my mother's
tongue. — 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

- And you completely blow me away and rip my world up and everything else, and then you go back to ignoring me."
"I blew you away?" I squeak out before I can stop myself.
He stares at me steadily. "You blew everything away. — Lauren Oliver

Is the most deadly of all evils, you can die of love or lack of it. — Lauren Oliver

Home is where I built my life.

- Henry Morbower — 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

Once you let in the word, once you allow it to take root, it will spread like a mold through all of your corners and dark spaces - and with it, the questions, the shivery, splintered fears, enough to keep you permanently awake. — Lauren Oliver

Everyone is asleep. They've been asleep for years. You seemed ... awake.
I'm tired of sleeping. — Lauren Oliver

Today, I go east. It's one of my favorite times of day: that perfect in-between moment when the light has a liquid feel, like a slow pour of syrup. Still, I can't shake loose the knot of unhappiness in my chest. I can't shake loose the idea that the rest of our lives might simply look like this: this running, and hiding, and losing the things we love, and burrowing underground, and scavenging for food and water.
There will be no turn in the tide. We will never march back into the cities, triumphant, crying out our victory in the streets. We will simply eke out a living here until there is no living to be eked. — 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 know that the whole point - the only point - is to
find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to
let them go. — Lauren Oliver

She felt as though, just for a second, she had understood something vastly important, had had a glimpse of it: love, pure and simple and undemanding. — Lauren Oliver

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

Who the hell calls at two in the morning?"
"Maybe it's Matt Wilde, confessing his love," Lindsay says.
"Very funny, — 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

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

And I love you too." His fingers skate the edge of my jaw, dance briefly
over my lips. "You should know that. You have to know that. — Lauren Oliver

There were always the birds — Lauren Oliver

They've lied about everything.-about the fence, and the existence of Invalids, about a million other things besides. They told us the raids were carried out for our own protection. They told us the regulators were only interested in keeping the peace.
They told us love was a disease. They told us it would kill us in the end.
For the very first time I realize, that this, too, maight also be a lie. — Lauren Oliver

Look, I'm not going to have sex with him just so he'll say that he loves me, you know?
... That isn't why I was planning to have sex with Rob - to hear the words, I mean. I just wanted to get it over with. I think. Actually, I'm not sure why it seemed so important. — 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

If I could make it better I would, he says. In some ways it's a stupid, obvious thing to say, but the way he said it, so honest and simple like it's the truest thing there is, makes the tears prick in my eyes. (Before I Fall) — 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

If you're smart, you care. And if you care, you love. — 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

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. — Lauren Oliver

In a world without love, this is what people are to each other: values, benefits, and liabilities, numbers and data. We weigh, we quantify, we measure, and the soul is ground to dust. — Lauren Oliver

Mama, Mama, help me get home
I'm out in the woods, I am out on my own.
I found me a werewolf, a nasty old mutt
It showed me its teeth and went straight for my gut.
Mama, Mama, help me get home
I'm out in the woods, I am out on my own.
I was stopped by a vampire, a rotting old wreck
It showed me its teeth and went straight for my neck.
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.
-From "A Child's Walk Home," Nursery Rhymes and Folk Tales — Lauren Oliver

He Is looking at me through the smoke, across the fence. He never takes his eyes off me. His hair Is a crown of leaves, of thorns, of flames. His eyes are blazing with light, more light than all the lights in every city in the whole world, more light than we could ever invent If we had ten thousand billion years. — Lauren Oliver

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

Sometimes day and night reverse. Sometimes up goes down and down goes up, and love turns into hate, and the things you counted on get washed out from under your feet, leaving you pedaling in the air. — Lauren Oliver

Into hate, into refusal, against hope and without fear — Lauren Oliver