Lauren Oliver Quotes

Live free or die.

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.

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.

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

How can someone have the power to shatter you to dust--and also to make you feel so whole?

Fridays are the hardest in some ways: you’re so close to freedom.

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.

I love you. Remember. They cannot take it

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

Sometimes you even have to give them up.

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.

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.

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.

A good friend keeps your secrets for you. A best friend helps you keep your own secrets.

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.

I'd rather die my way than live yours.

Hope keeps you alive.

Hearts are fragile things. That's why you have to be so careful.

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.

You have to go forward: It's the only way.

You have to go forward no matter what happens. This is the universal law.

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.

people themselves are full of tunnels: winding, dark spaces and caverns;

impossible to know all the places inside of them. Impossible even to imagine.

The memories seem like snapshots from someone else’s life.

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.

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.

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.

An eye for an eye." "And the whole world goes blind," Coral puts in quietly.

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.

Black is too morbid; red will set them on edge; pink is too juvenile; orange is freakish

The sparrows jumped before they knew how to fly, and they learned to fly only because they had jumped.

The tunnels may be long, and twisted, and dark; but you are supposed to go through them.

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.

I love you. Remember. And someday, I will find you again.

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.

I'd rather die on my own terms than live on theirs.

I'd rather die loving Alex than live without him.

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.

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

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.

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

The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone.

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.

Love: It will kill you and save you, both

So many things become beautiful when you really look.

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.

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.

This is what hatred is. It will feed you and at the same time turn you to rot.

The rules of Panic are simple. Anyone can enter. But only one person will win.

I know the past will drag you backward and down, have you snatching at whispers of wind and the gibberish of trees rubbing together, trying to decipher some code, trying to piece together what was broken. It's hopeless. The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside you like a stone.

Snapshots, moments, mere seconds: as fragile and beautiful and hopeless as a single butterfly, flapping on against a gathering wind.

Most people don't want to be saved. Besides, if you keep bailing everybody out, they'll never learn to paddle on their own.