1.
But how could anyone who's ever seen a summer - big explosion of green and skies lit up electric with splashy sunsets, a riot of flowers and wind that smells like honey - pick the snow?
Lauren Oliver
2.
Live free or die.
Lauren Oliver
3.
It's funny, isn't it? When you are young you just want to be old, and then later you wish you could go back to being a kid.
Lauren Oliver
4.
I know what the problem is, of course. The disorientation, the distraction, the difficulty focusing - all classic Phase One signs of deliria. But I don't care. If pneumonia felt this good I'd stand out in the snow in the winter with bare feet and no coat, or march into the hospital and kiss pneumonia patients
Lauren Oliver
5.
How can someone have the power to shatter you to dust--and also to make you feel so whole?
Lauren Oliver
6.
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
7.
Fridays are the hardest in some ways: you’re so close to freedom.
Lauren Oliver
8.
As soon as I look up, his eyes click onto my face. The breath whooshes out of my body and everything freezes for a second, as though I’m looking at him through my camera lens, zoomed in all the way, the world pausing for that tiny span of time between the opening and closing of the shutter.
Lauren Oliver
9.
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.
Lauren Oliver
10.
i think of all the thousands of billions of steps and missteps and chances and coincidences that have brought me here. Brought you here, and it feels like the biggest miracle in the world.
Lauren Oliver
11.
I love you. Remember. They cannot take it
Lauren Oliver
12.
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
13.
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
14.
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 it, let it slide like coins through you fingers. So much time you can waste it. But for some of us there's only today. And the truth is, you never really know.
Lauren Oliver
15.
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.
Lauren Oliver
16.
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
17.
Hope keeps you alive.
Lauren Oliver
18.
I'd rather die my way than live yours.
Lauren Oliver
19.
A good friend keeps your secrets for you. A best friend helps you keep your own secrets.
Lauren Oliver
20.
Black is too morbid; red will set them on edge; pink is too juvenile; orange is freakish
Lauren Oliver
21.
Hearts are fragile things. That's why you have to be so careful.
Lauren Oliver
22.
Please understand. Please forgive me. I prayed every day for you to be alive, until hope became painful. Don't hate me. I still love you.
Lauren Oliver
23.
Droplets, droplets: we are all identical drips and drops of people, hovering, waiting to be tipped, waiting for someone to show us the way, to pour us down a path.
Lauren Oliver
24.
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.
Lauren Oliver
25.
You have to go forward: It's the only way. You have to go forward no matter what happens. This is the universal law.
Lauren Oliver
26.
The memories seem like snapshots from someone else’s life.
Lauren Oliver
27.
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.
Lauren Oliver
28.
The sparrows jumped before they knew how to fly, and they learned to fly only because they had jumped.
Lauren Oliver
29.
I guess that's what saying good-bye is always like--like jumping off an edge. The worst part is making the choice to do it. Once you're in the air, there's nothing you can do but let go.
Lauren Oliver
30.
people themselves are full of tunnels: winding, dark spaces and caverns; impossible to know all the places inside of them. Impossible even to imagine.
Lauren Oliver
31.
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.
Lauren Oliver
32.
I love you. Remember. And someday, I will find you again.
Lauren Oliver
33.
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
34.
An eye for an eye." "And the whole world goes blind," Coral puts in quietly.
Lauren Oliver
35.
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
36.
The tunnels may be long, and twisted, and dark; but you are supposed to go through them.
Lauren Oliver
37.
The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone.
Lauren Oliver
38.
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
39.
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
40.
I'd rather die on my own terms than live on theirs. I'd rather die loving Alex than live without him.
Lauren Oliver
41.
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
42.
It was as though the darkness was a sheet of raw cookie dough and someone had just taken a cookie cutter and made a child-sized shape out of it.
Lauren Oliver
43.
It's like a razor blade edging its way through my organs, shredding me, all I can think is: It will kill me, it will kill me, it will kill me. And I don't care.
Lauren Oliver
44.
That is the strangest thing about the world: how it looks so different from every point of view.
Lauren Oliver
45.
You can't be happy unless you're unhappy sometimes".
Lauren Oliver
46.
For a second I feel a rush of sadness: for the horizons that vanish behind us, for the people we leave behind, the tiny-doll selves that get stored away and ultimately buried.
Lauren Oliver
47.
Droplets, droplets: We are all identical drips and drops of people, hovering, waiting to be tipped, waiting for someone to show us the way, to pour us down a path. ... He has tipped us over, all of us in our teetering expectancy, and now we are pouring toward him, coursing on a wave of sound, of roaring shouts and applause. ... They are the moon; we are a tide, their tide, and under their direction we will wipe clean all the sickness and blight from the world.
Lauren Oliver
48.
So many things become beautiful when you really look.
Lauren Oliver
49.
Love: It will kill you and save you, both
Lauren Oliver
50.
It's like there's a filter set up in my brain, except instead of making things better, it twists everything around so what comes out of my mouth is totally wrong, totally different from what I was thinking.
Lauren Oliver