Lauren Oliver Quotes

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

I love you. Remember. They cannot take it

Find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse

Find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.

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

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.

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.

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

If you’re smart, you care. And if you care, you love.

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.

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.

That’s when I realized that certain moments go on forever. Even after they’re over they still go on, even after you're dead and buried, those moments are lasting still, backward and forward, on into infinity. They are everything and everywhere all at once.

She liked the word ineffable because it meant a feeling so big or vast that it could not be expressed in words.

And yet, because it could not be expressed in words, people had invented a word to express it, and that made Liesl feel hopeful, somehow.

I learned to swallow words back, hold secrets on my tongue until they dissolved like soap bubbles.

The world has nothing to offer me, no single shred of interest. I'm a woman trapped on a balcony, watching a passing parade, a blur of noise and motion that eventually turns to a single point on the horizon, a gutter full of trampled and muddy cups, and the sense of wasting an afternoon.

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.

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

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.

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

....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.

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

Popularity's a weird thing. You can't really define it, and it's not cool to talk about, but you know it when you see it. Like a lazy eye, or porn.

Live free or die.

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.

And when I wake up it's wonderful, like I've been carried quietly onto a calm, peaceful shore, and the dream, and its meaning, has broken over me like a wave and is ebbing away now, leaving me with a single, solid certainty. I know now.

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.

It was so strange, the way that life moved forward: the twists and the dead ends, the sudden opportunities. She supposed if you could predict or foresee everything that was going to happen, you’d lose the motivation to go through it all. The promise was always in the possibility.

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)

I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa

You can't be happy unless you're unhappy sometimes".

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.

And for a moment―for a split second―everything else falls away, the whole pattern and order of my life, and a huge joy crests in my chest. I am no one, and I owe nothing to anybody, and my life is my own.

God bless Dunkin' Donuts.

Unhappiness is bondage; therefore, happiness is freedom.

He is my world and my world is him and without him there is no world.

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

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.

If they really want us to be happy, they'd let us pick ourselves.

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.

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 suddenly it's all so ridiculously and stupidly clear I feel like laughing. 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.

In my dream I know I am falling. But there is no up or down, no walls or sides or ceilings, just the sensation of cold and darkness everywhere. I am so scared I could scream. But when I open my mouth, nothing happens. And I wonder if you fall forever and never touch down, is it really still falling? I think I will fall forever.

Things change after you die, though, I guess because dying is the loneliest thing you can do.

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

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

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

Let me tell you something about dying: it's not as bad as they says.

it's the coming-back-to-life part that hurts.

Two weeks until your cure" she says finally. "Sixteen days" I say, but in my head I'm counting: Seven days. Seven days until I'm free and away from all these people and their sliding superficial lives brushing past one another gliding, gliding, gliding from life to death. For them there's hardly a change between the two.

Of all the miracles Po had seen in the time and space of its death, Po thought this-the absorption of another, the carrying of it-was the most bewildering and remarkable of all. Whenever Bundle separated again, Po was left with an ache of sadness that reminded the ghost of the body it had left behind.

But before you start pointing fingers, let me ask you: is what I did really so bad? So bad I deserved to die? So bad I deserved to die like that?
Is what I did really so much worse than what anybody else does?
Is it really so much worse than what you do?
Think about it.

But you can build a future out of anything. A scrap, a flicker. The desire to go forward, slowly, one foot at a time. You can build an airy city out of ruins.

Hope keeps you alive.

Aquí hay algo más que recordar: la esperanza te mantiene viva. Incluso cuando estás muerta, es lo único que te mantiene viva.

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

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

Poetry isn't like any writing I've ever heard before. I don't understand all of it, just bits of images, sentences that appear half-finished, all fluttering together like brightly colored ribbons in the wind.

And it's the funniest thing: as soon as I see it, the whistling in my ears stops and the feeling of terror drains away, and I realize this whole time I haven't been falling at all. I've been floating.

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.

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.

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.

The hours here are flat and round, disks of gray layered one on top of the other...they move slowly, at a grind, until it seems as though they are not moving at all. They are just pressing down...

Maybe you can afford to wait. Maybe for you there's a tomorrow. Maybe for you there's one thousand tomorrows, or three thousand, or ten, so much time you can bathe in it, roll around in it, let it slide like coins through your fingers. So much time you can waste it.
But for some there's only today. And the truth is, you never really know.

Up and down, up and down, a ladder of choices leading to the next choice, and the next, until suddenly you've run out of choices, and ladder, and you find time as rare and thin as air on a mountain. Then it's oops, sorry, turn's over.

For the shortest time, shorter than the shortest secon'd breath, you get to stand up to infinity.
But eventually, and always, infinity wins.

even as each minute seems to take an hour, each hour seems to fly by in a minute.

Time waits for no man, but progress waits for man to inact it.

Take it from me: If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging up your back and runing its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do-the only thing-is run.

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

I'm scared all the time," she whispered. "You'd be an idiot if you weren't," Anne said. "And you wouldn't be brave either.

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.

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.

I was going to tell you that you look beautiful with your hair down. That's all I was going to say.

no glove, no love

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.

The air is still and freezing cold. The sky is a perfect, pale blue. The sun has just risen, weak and watery-looking, like it has just spilled itself over the horizon and it's too lazy to clean itself up.

It's so strange how life works: You want something and you wait and wait and feel like it's taking forever to come. Then it happens and it's over and all you want to do is curl back up in that moment before things changed.

It's like the idea of him is better than the him of him.

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.

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

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

We are such small, stupid things. For most of my life I thought of nature as the stupid thing: Blind, animal, destructive. We, the humans, were clean and smart and in control: we had wrestled the rest of the world into submission, battered it down, pinned it to a glass slide and the pages of The Bool of Shhh.

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

At the same time I know that it’s not really their fault, at least not completely. I did my part too. I did it on a hundred different days and in a thousand different ways, and I know it. But this makes the anger worse, not better.

The details that are 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. so many things become beautiful when you really look.

Of course. That's what people do in a disordered world, a world of freedom and choice: they leave when they want. They disappear, they come back, they leave again. And you are left to pick up the pieces on your own.

When you're completely free, you're also completely on your own.

Welcome to the free world. We give people the power to choose. They can even choose the wrong thing. Beautiful, isn't it?

Freedom is exhausting.

A free world is also a world of fracture

I guess they'll find out that freedom doesn't keep you warm,

Everything in me feels fluttering and free, like I could take off from the ground at any second. Music, I think, he makes me feel like music.

Music, I think, he makes me feel like music.

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.

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.

Music doesn't have a body, but that's real...

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...

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.

If people changed, it meant that she was allowed to change too. She could be different.

She could be happier.

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.

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-

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

People are stubborn and stupid. They're irrational. they're destructive. that's the point, isn't it? That's the whole reason for the cure. People will no longer destroy their own lives. They won't be capable of it.

This is the mistake they make above. They think that only certain people habe a place. Only certain kinds of people belong. The rest is waste. But even waste must have a place. Otherwise it will clog and clot, and rot and fester.

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.

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.

All of it was hers, hers and Nat's, and all those years were nestled inside them like one of those Russian dolls, holding dozens of tiny selves inside it.

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.

Power isn't free. Energy isn't free. It has to be earned.

It was unfair that people could pretend to be one thing when they were really something else. That they would get you on their side and then do nothing but fail, and fail, and fail again. People should come with warnings, like cigarette packs: involvement would kill you over time.

Take down the walls.

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 sun somehow negated or reversed?

Everyone you trust, everyone you think can count on, will eventually disappoint you. When left to their own devices, people lie and keep secrets and change and disappear…

Someday all the wilds will be razed, and we will be left with a concrete landscape, a land of pretty houses and trim gardens and planned parks and forests, and a world that works as smoothly as a clock, neatly wound: a world of metal and gears, and people going tick-tick-tick to their deaths.

But for now, the future, like the past, means nothing.

on the day that started it all, that rocketed me forward and landed me here, in this new body, in this new future.

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