Lauren Oliver Quotes

I’ve been in the Wilds for a month and a half now, and in that time I’ve almost forgotten about the fences. 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.

~ Lauren Oliver

I suppose that's the secret. If you're ever wishing for things to go back to the way they were, you just have to look up.

~ Lauren Oliver

Suicide. A sideways word, a word that people whisper and mutter and cough: a word that must be squeezed out behind cupped palms or murmured behind closed doors. It was only in dreams that I heard the word shouted, screamed.

~ Lauren Oliver

Sympathizer.It’s only slightly better than the other word that followed me for years after my mom’s death, a snakelike hiss, undulating, leaving its trail of poison: Suicide.A sideways word, a word that people whisper and mutter and cough: a word that must be squeezed out behind cupped palms or murmured behind closed doors. It was only in my dreams that I heard the word shouted, screamed.

~ Lauren Oliver

But all you see is the crap. So you don't have to believe in anything. So you'll have an excuse to fail.

~ 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

Here's the last thing that occurs to me as Sarah recedes in the rearview mirror, slamming out of the car, jogging across the parking lot: If you're one tardy away from missing out on a big competition, you should probably make your coffee at home.

~ Lauren Oliver

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

~ Lauren Oliver

I met an Invalid, and fell for his art. He showed me his smile, and went straight for my heart.

~ 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

Could it be? Samantha Kingston? Home? On a Friday?” I roll my eyes. “I don’t know. Did you do a lot of acid in the sixties? Could be a flashback.” “I was two years old in 1960. I came too late for the party.” He leans down and pecks me on the head. I pull away out of habit. “And I’m not even going to ask how you know about acid flashbacks.” “What’s an acid flashback?” Izzy crows. “Nothing,” my dad and I say at the same time, and he smiles at me.

~ Lauren Oliver

There is only what you want and what happens. There is only grabbing on and holding tight in the darkness.

~ 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. Sometimes people stop loving you. And that's the kind of darkness that never gets fixed, no matter how many moons rise again, filling the sky with a weak approximation of light.

~ Lauren Oliver

Because I think you're right. You can make a difference. He told me experiences were kind of like fate, and fate usually came in the form of a test. He told me fate liked to be worshiped. It liked to see us fall on out knees before it offered to help us up... ♥

~ Lauren Oliver

Is what I did really so bad? So bad I deserve to die? So bad I deserved to die like that?I what I did really so much worse than waht anybody else does?Is it really so much worse than what you do?Think about it.

~ Lauren Oliver

You broke my heart.I fell for you and you broke my heart.Period, done, end of story.

~ Lauren Oliver

Lies are just stories, and stories are all that matter. We all tell stories. Some are more truthful than others, maybe, but in the end the only thing that counts is what you can make people believe.

~ Lauren Oliver

Anger is useful only to a certain point. After that, it becomes rage, and rage will make you careless.

~ Lauren Oliver

Because I am terrified by what I want: for him, and worst of all, from him. Because I do want. I'm not even sure what, exactly, but the want is there, just like the hate and anger were there before. But this is not a tower. It is an endless, tunneling pit; it drives deep, and opens a hole inside me.

~ Lauren Oliver

Don't you get it? You can't tell me what to feel.

~ Lauren Oliver

Running is a mental sport, more than anything else. You're only as good as your training, and your training is only as good as your thinking.

~ Lauren Oliver

Not gray, exactly. Right before the sun rises there's a moment when the whole sky goes this pale nothing color-not really gray but sort of, or sort of white, and I've always really liked it because it reminds me of waiting for something good to happen.

~ Lauren Oliver

I keep having the urge to cross my hands over my chest, to cover up my breasts, to hide. I'm suddenly aware of how pale I look in the sunshine, and how many moles I have spotting up and down my chest, and I just know he's looking at me thinking i'm wrong or deformed. But the he breathes, 'Beautiful' and when his eyes meet mine I know that he really, truly means it.

~ 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

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

Everyone is asleep. They've all been asleep for years. You seemed ... awake.' Alex is whispering now. He closes his eyes, opens them again.'I'm tired of sleeping.

~ Lauren Oliver

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

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.

~ Lauren Oliver

He believed in people. He believed that if people could only be shown the right way-the way to health and order, a way to be free of unhappiness-they would make the right choice. They would obey.

~ Lauren Oliver

This was progress. This was modernity: you could cover over the past completely. You could bury the old under a relentless surface of new, stretched from corner to corner.

~ Lauren Oliver

Love will turn the whole world into something greater than itself.

~ 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

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

But those are just words, and words are just stories, and eventually, always, stories come to an end.

~ Lauren Oliver

You can’t go home again” ─ isn’t necessarily that places change but people do.

~ Lauren Oliver

I don't know which is worse: that I'm home and so much is different, or that I'm home and so much feels the same.

~ 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

We are all punished for the lives we have chosen, in one way or another.

~ Lauren Oliver

Raven looks at me. “What about you, Lena?”I can feel Alex’s eyes on me. My mouth is so dry; the sun is so blinding. I look away, toward the hundreds and hundreds of people who have been driven out of their homes, out of their lives, to this place of dust and dirtiness, all because they wanted the power to feel, to think, to choose for themselves. They couldn’t have known that even this was a lie—that we never really choose, not entirely. We are always being pushed and squeezed down one road or another. We have no choice but to step forward, and then step forward again, and then step forward again; suddenly we find ourselves on a road we haven’t chosen at all.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.Coral shifts, and moves her hand to Alex’s arm.“I’m with Julian,” I say at last. This, after all, is what I have chosen.

~ Lauren Oliver

Every choice is limited. That's life.

~ Lauren Oliver