Lauren Oliver Quotes

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

You have to learn that people are always listening.

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

We should be protected from the people who will leave us in the end, from all the people who will disappear or forget us.

What I meant was, you looked happier in the pictures.

Everything ends, people move on, they don't look back. It's how they should be.

People need other people to feel things for them," she said. "It gets lonely to feel things all by yourself.

He's stuck with me and I'm stuck with him. We're stuck. That's what growing up is all about, I guess.

It's an incredible thing, how you can feel so taken care of by someone and yet feel, also, like you would die or do anything just for the chance to protect him back.

It's going to be okay. Words that mean nothing. really, just sounds intoned into vastness and darkness, little scrabbling attempts to latch on to something when we're falling.

For the first time in my life I've done something for me and by choice and not because somebody told me it was good or bad.

Are you sure you can't dematerialize? Not even a little?" "I'm sure.

Mistake, mistake, mistake. A strange word: stinging, somehow.

It is a beautiful world for the people who get to play the fist.

The worst is knowing I can't tell anybody what's happening -or what's happened- to me. Not even my mom.

I'm so tired after dinner I fall asleep with my clothes on, almost as soon as my head hits the pillow, and so I forget to ask God, in my prayers, to keep me from waking up.

Everything I see and touch reminds me of him, and so everything I see and touch is perfect.

They’d already taken her from me once. I didn’t want to lose her again.

I need him to know that I came for him. I need him to know that somehow, at some point in the tunnels, I began to love him.

Something must die so that others can live.

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.

For the first time in a long time, I actually look at her. I've always thought Lena was pretty, but now it occurs to me that at some point - last summer? last year? - she became beautiful.

That's the thing: We didn't really care. A world without love is also a world without stakes.

Waste today, want tomorrow.

There is nothing else for people to do. They do not think. They feel no passion, no hatred, no sadness; they feel nothing but fear, and a desire to control. So they watch, and poke, and pry.

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.

I start to back away before I do something wildly inappropriate, like jump on top of him.

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.

We can never understand. We can only try, fumbling our way through the tunneled places, reaching for light.

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

She was mine before she was yours.

Unhappiness is bondage; therefore, happiness is freedom. The way to find happiness is through the cure. Therefore, it is only through the cure that one finds freedom.

I just want to be normal, like everybody else." "Are you sure that being like everybody else will make you happy?

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, might also be a lie.

That's when you really lose people, you know.When the pain passes.

Time jumps. It leaps. It pours away like water through fingers.

It's a miracle I was able to get out of the house today. It's a miracle I'm even wearing pants, a double miracle I remembered to wear shoes.

The question was: Will you meet me tomorrow? And the word was: Yes.

I am growing stronger. I am a stone being excavated by the slow passage of water; I am wood charred by a fire.

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

I still wanted to know why. As though somebody was going to answer that for me, as though any answer would be satisfying.

Some things are better left buried and forgotten.

There is so much fragility in kissing, in other people: It is all glass.

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.

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.

Nothing exists but him.

This was what being cured was like: like being in a fishbowl, circling always inside the same glass.

Everyone you trust, everyone you think you can count on, will eventually disappoint you.

my wild, uncured, erratic, incomprehensible heart.

And in that moment, the wordless thing passed between us, the thing that wasn't quite love but was so close I could believe in it sometimes.