Top 540 Quotes & Sayings by Lauren Oliver

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American author Lauren Oliver.
Last updated on November 25, 2024.
Lauren Oliver

Lauren Oliver is an American author of numerous young adult novels including Panic; the Delirium trilogy: Delirium, Pandemonium, and Requiem; and Before I Fall, which became a major motion picture in 2017. Panic was also turned into a series by Amazon studios. She served as creator, writer and showrunner on the project. Her novels have been translated into more than thirty languages internationally. Oliver is a 2012 E.B. White Read-Aloud Award nominee for her middle-grade novel Liesl & Po, as well as author of the middle-grade fantasy novel The Spindlers.

Finishing books - and leaving the world you've created - is always a kind of emotionally wrenching experience. I usually cry.
I was a troubled teen and I was constantly looking for someone to throw me a rope. Those ropes are connections. They allow us to see that life exists beyond the little worlds we are currently a part of.
I try to write characters that are as real, emotionally and psychologically, as I can make them; I feel the same way about setting. This often means that I'm drawing from my experiences and observations.
One of the things I've tried to do in my career is really write different kinds of books, so I'm able to broaden people's expectations of what I'm allowed to do.
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.
With 'Delirium,' I had to spend time thinking about the political, social and religious structure of a different world. But it was a fun challenge. — © Lauren Oliver
With 'Delirium,' I had to spend time thinking about the political, social and religious structure of a different world. But it was a fun challenge.
I think dystopian futures are also a reflection of current fears.
There are times I wish I was more conventional. I would get a husband and a baby and a big SUV in the 'burbs and be happy. But forging my own way - my career, my relationships with wonderful but troubled people - that's who I am.
I think I'm able to do so much because writing is what I love to do. So, often when I have free time, I choose to write and edit.
I worked in publishing before I became an author, so I knew how a book gets made.
I love to sleep. I'm an excellent, excellent sleeper.
I think 'Voldemort' is definitely the scariest villain.
My parents were pretty liberal, but they were still parents. I definitely had my teenage rebellion.
I often write two books simultaneously. Usually one of them starts out as a fun experiment designed to give me a daily break from the real book I'm writing. And then that becomes a real book too.
I have a beautiful pair of Giuseppe Zanotti black pumps that make me feel like a model every time I put them on. I have a pair of Jimmy Choo flats I would marry, if I could.
I think all artists are only interested in a couple of themes, really. I'm primarily interested in change and connection as being this restorative force. I write about them because that's what I think about in my own life.
You don't reach points in life at which everything is sorted out for us. I believe in endings that should suggest our stories always continue. — © Lauren Oliver
You don't reach points in life at which everything is sorted out for us. I believe in endings that should suggest our stories always continue.
'Requiem' has been controversial because people don't feel I gave it closure.
I feel a lot of adult fiction looks down on plot as a lesser form of literature.
How is it possible, I think, to change so much and not be able to change anything at all?
Most people don't want to be saved. Besides, if you keep bailing everybody out, they'll never learn to paddle on their own.
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.
He who leaps for the sky may fall, it's true. But he may also fly.
When you love someone, when you care for someone, you have to do it through the good and the bad. Not just when you're happy and it's easy.
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.
How can someone have the power to shatter you to dust--and also to make you feel so whole?
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.
We stand there for a moment, looking at each other, and in that instant I feel our connection so strongly it's as though it achieves physical existence, becomes a hand all around us, cupping us together, protecting us. This is what people are always talking about when they talk about god: this feeling, of being held and understood and protected. feeling this way seems about as close to saying a prayer as you could get.
If you cross a line and nothing happens, the line loses meaning.
Hearts are fragile things. That's why you have to be so careful.
Hate isn’t the most dangerous thing, he’d said. Indifference is.
I've been so used to thinking of what the borders are keeping out that I haven't considered that they're also penning us in.
You have to go forward: It's the only way. You have to go forward no matter what happens. This is the universal law.
I was glad when the Invalids were executed. Some people complained that lethal injection was too humane for convicted terrorists, but I thought it sent a powerful message: We are not the evil ones. We are reasonable and compassionate. We stand for fairness, structure, and organization. It’s the other side, the uncureds, who bring the chaos.
A good friend keeps your secrets for you. A best friend helps you keep your own secrets.
I'd rather die my way than live yours.
I'd rather die on my own terms than live on theirs. I'd rather die loving Alex than live without him.
I guess that’s just part of loving people: You have to give things up. Sometimes you even have to give them up.
In a world without love, this is what people are to each other: values, benefits, and liabilities, numbers and data. We weigh, we quantify, we measure, and the soul is ground to dust.
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 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.
You can't be happy unless you're unhappy sometimes". — © Lauren Oliver
You can't be happy unless you're unhappy sometimes".
Huamns, uregulated, are cruel and capricious; violet and selfish; miserable and quarrelsome. It is only after their instincts and basic emotions have been controlled that they can be happy, generous, and good.
He is no longer mine to lose, but the grief is there, a gnawing sense of disbelief.
Things would get difficult again. But that was okay too. The bravery was in moving forward, no matter what.
What is beauty? Beauty is no more than a trick; a delusion; the influence of excited particles and electrons colliding in your eyes, jostling in your brain like a bunch of overeager school children, about to be released on break. Will you let yourself be deluded? Will you let yourself be decieved? -"On Beauty and Falsehood," The New Philosophy, by Ellen Dorpshire
I don't know whether these feelings - this thing growing inside of me - is something horrible and sick or the best thing that's ever happened to me. Either way, I can't stop it. I've lost control. And the truly sick thing is that despite everything, I'm glad.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
The devil stole into the Garden of Eden. He carried with him the disease - amor deliria nervosa - in the form of a seed. It grew and flowered into a magnificent apple tree, which bore apples as bright as blood. -From Genesis: A Complete History of the World and the Known Universe, by Steven Horace, PhD, Harvard University
Sometimes I'm afraid to go to sleep because of what I'm leaving behind. — © Lauren Oliver
Sometimes I'm afraid to go to sleep because of what I'm leaving behind.
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.
i suppose that's the secret, if you're ever wishing for things to back the way they were. You just have to look up.
Through wind, and tempest, storm, and rain; The calm shall be buried inside of me; A warm stone, heavy and dry; The root, the source, a weapon against pain
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.
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.
That's the thing about best friends. That's what they do. They keep you from spinning off the edge.
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