Top 181 Quotes & Sayings by Lauren DeStefano - Page 2

I wonder what it’s like for her, looking so much like a dead girl.

I start trying to stay unconscious. The problem with this is that no amount of willpower can change the reality.

I'm suddenly finding it hard to know the difference between nightmares and consciousness.

She has the majesty of hurricanes and explosions.

I never wanted to live forever," she says. "I just wanted enough time.

Cure" is one of the most precious words in the English language. It's a short word. A clean and simple word. But it isn't so easy a thing as it sounds. There are questions like: How will this affect us in ten years? In twenty? What will it do to our children? Our children's children?

We can change so many times in our lives. We're born into a family, and it's the only life we can imagine, but it changes. Buildings collapse. Fires burn. And the next second we're someplace else entirely, going through different motions and trying to keep up with this new person we've become.

Maybe it is desperation. Maybe we can't let things fall apart without trying. We can't let go of the people we love.

A party in the orange grove. The pain on Linden's face is immediate. I am unwavering. He has cost me more pain than I will ever be able to repay.

Before I can process what’s happening, Deirdre has opened her hands and Linden has taken the ring from her and slipped it onto my finger. “Rhine Ashby,” he says. “My wife.

There’s a limit to how much living can be done in a life without freedom.

I wanted to be rid of him," he says. He raises my chin with his thumb. "But not if it meant being rid of you. I climbed in beside you, and you put your head in my lap. You can't think I would have left you like that." "Look what it got you," I say. "Tea in bed and you here in front of me," he says. "It was a terrible decision, and I confess I'd make it again.

I can almost see what Gabriel meant when he asked, 'What has the free world got that you can’t get here?' Almost. Freedom, Gabriel. That’s what you can’t get here.

Ah, love. That’s what the world has lost. There’s no more love, only the illusion of it.

Good night, sweetheart," he says. "Good bye, sweetheart," I say. And it's so casual, so innocent that he doesn't suspect a thing.

It doesn't matter how much his mother loves him; love is not enough to keep any of us alive.

Eventually I realize that I am holding on to him just as tightly as he holds on to me. And here we are: two small dying things, as the world ends around us like falling autumn leaves.

Times like this, when she slips her hand into mine and holds on tight, and our husband becomes just a shadow in the doorway.

So many of the things I've wanted are the things I've been taught to fear.

There's a sort of dead passion in him. A spark that, had he more years to live, would be a wildfire.

She smiles at our husband as she moves, and he blushes, overcome by her beauty. But I know what her smile really means...Her smile is her revenge.

Maybe hope isn't the most dangerous thing a person can have. Maybe love is.

Someday I'll tell you all of it," I say. "I'd like that," he says. "No," I say. "I promise you won't.

I wonder if she has figured out that I'll never love Linden, especially not in the way she does, and that he'll never love anyone the way he loves her. I wonder if she realizes, despite all her efforts to train me, that I can never take her place.

I think humans have always been desperate. I think it has always been about doing something awful if it might help, when the only other option is death. Maybe that's what being a parent is supposed to feel like.

He kissed back, all the pages spread out around us like riddles waiting to be solved. Let them wait. Let my genes unravel, my hinges come loose. If my fate rests in the hands of a madman, let death come and bring its worse. I'll take the ruined craters of laboratories, the dead trees, this city with ashes in the oxygen, if it means freedom. I'd sooner die here than live a hundred years with wires in my veins.

I think, in this strange world of beautiful things, there may be some humanity after all.

Once upon a time there were two parents, two children, and a brick house with lilies in the yard. The parents died, the lilies wilted. One child disappeared. Then the other." Pg 225

But there’s no such thing as free. There are only different and more horrible ways to be enslaved.

Kettle thingies. Yum.

Lovers are weapons, but love is a wound.

I liked just being with you. I liked the way you breathed when you were asleep. I liked when you took the champagne glass from my hand. I liked how your fingers were always too long for your gloves.

I nod like I'm not at all unnerved by this new cold side to him. Not cruel like his father. Not warm like the husband who sought me out on quiet nights. Something in between. This Linden has never woven his fingers through mine, never chosen me from a line of weary Gathered girls, never said he loved me in a myriad of coloured lights. We are nothing to each other.

...maybe hope isn't such a bad thing. Maybe it's what keeps us together.

None of the wives mention the security guards by the door, who will probably tackle us to the ground if we try to leave without our husbands.

Poor kid,' Jenna says, and rolls her eyes toward me for a moment. Then she returns to her book. 'She doesn't even understand what kind of place this is.

There's nothing here to say good-bye to. There's no dancing girl. No mischievous smile. She's gone, off with her sisters, broken free, escaped. And if she were here now, she would say, "Go.

Don't you miss it?" I say. "Being free." He laughs.

Home?' I say. It's a word that can mean anywhere and nowhere.

I miss something I never even had.

Fate, I think, is a thief.

She's been conned, ruined, left for dead, and she's not going to forgive any of it. She will soldier on, if only out of spite.

A strange thing, words. Once they're said, it's hard to imagine they're untrue.

We were his disposable things. Brought to him like cattle. Stripped of what made us sisters or daughters or children. There was nothing that he could take from us—our genes, our bones, our wombs—that would ever satisfy him. There was no other way that we would be free.

Maybe what frightens us about the edge isn't our fear of morality, but the thoughts it leads us to have.

There was a desperate undercurrent to our marriage--a feeling of being in a dream from which I couldn't seem to awaken. A nagging sense that my life, laid out so neatly like the clothes Deirdre left on my divan, was no longer my own.

There is warmth shooting through my broken body where there should be pain, and I put my arms around the back of his neck and I hold on to him. I hold on because you never know in this place when something good will be taken away.

I was born into a world that was already dying; I belong to it.

My sisters were in that van.

And if I have to die trying, I will get out of here.

He gathers me up and I'm weightless before he sets me on the railing. He's the only thing keeping me from falling back, out of the reach of daylight. I'm not afraid of falling. I don't fear the sky beyond the train tracks like I did before. I can go anywhere just so long as it's with him.

I shake my head, watching snow tumble and swirl from an all-white sky. The world seems so clean if you only look up

Tell freedom I said hello.' 'If I happen to see it, I will.

Hope, that risky, illustrious thing. It should have gone extinct by now, but we keep it alive.

Love is not enough to keep any of us alive.

Living in a place like this, she must have learned how to see all the monsters that can hide a person.

It isn’t a perfect place. There are no perfect places. But nobody cares about perfection when there are sand castles to build and kites to chase, children that are being born, old hearts that are giving in.

I think he's beginning to understand, and understanding is a horrible thing.

Rhine. The river that, somewhere out there, has broken free.

The world seems so clean if you only looked up.