Top 540 Quotes & Sayings by Lauren Oliver - Page 5

I’m with Julian,” I say at last. This, after all, is what I have chosen.

I close my eyes. An image flashes—emerging from the van with Julian after our escape from New York City; believing, in that moment, that we had escaped the worst, that life would begin again for us. Instead life has only grown harder.

But if you do believe, then you already know all about magic.

There are some losses we never get over.

For a moment, my heart aches for him. I should never have asked him to join me here; I should never have asked him to cross.

Fred is officially the mayor of Portland now.

It will kill me, it will kill me, it will kill me. And I don't care.

They didn’t get me, I should have said. They saved me.

I didn’t know it would be like this,” he says in a whisper. And then: “I’m scared.

We leave Pippa behind, standing in the dark, teeming bowels of the camp, while the sun begins to stain the sky electric, and from all sides the guns draw closer.

Live free or die.

For a split second, he had looked almost like my Alex again.

The Wilds aren't safe anymore.

Because if it weren’t for me, Lena and Alex would never have been caught at all. I told on them. I was jealous.

If Cassie was invalidated because she caught the disease, or because Fred suspected her of it, I can only imagine what he will do to me and to my family if he discovers that the cure did not work perfectly.

Until, one day, she wasn’t.

I think of Grace and feel a sharp pain in my chest.

Alex is dead, do you hear me? All of that-what we felt, what it meant- that's done now, okay? Buried. Blown away.

The mark of the procedure. A real one. Lu is cured.

That is the strangest thing about the world: how it looks so different from every point of view.

Step on a crack , you'll break your mama's back. Step on a stone, you'll end up all alone. Step on a stick, you're bound to get the Sick. Watch where you tread, you'll bring out all the dead. - A common children's playground chant, usually accompanied by jumping rope or clapping.

There is nothing else for people to do. They do not think. They feel no passion, no hatred, no sadness; they feel nothing but fear, and a desire to control. So they watch, and poke, and pry.

The alchemist was dazed and dumbfounded, as the true meaning of the magic was revealed: *The dead will rise from glade to glen and ancient will be young again*. The dead had, after all, risen. From dead and dry things there was growth, and new life everywhere. And the endlessly long winter had at last turned to spring. From life to death and back again to life. It was indeed the greatest magic in the world.

Everyone you trust, everyone you think you can count on, will eventually disappoint you.

Maybe this is the secret to talking to boys--maybe you just have to be angry all the time.

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

That's the thing: We didn't really care. A world without love is also a world without stakes.

And there it is: Even though we’re standing in the same patch of sun-drenched pavement, we might as well be a hundred thousand miles apart.

Grief is like sinking, like being buried. I am in water the tawny color of kicked-up dirt. Every breath is full of choking. There is nothing to hold on to, no sides, no way to claw myself up. There is nothing to do but let go. Let go. Feel the weight all around you, feel the squeezing of your lungs, the slow, low pressure. Let yourself go deeper. There is nothing but bottom. There is nothing but the taste of metal, and the echoes of old things, and days that look like darkness.

We can never understand. We can only try, fumbling our way through the tunneled places, reaching for light.

At a certain point your brain stops to rationalize things. At a certain point it gives up, shuts off, shuts down.

But...books are so much more. Some of them are webs; you can feel your way along their threads, but just barely, into strange and dark corners. Some of them are balloons bobbing up through the sky: totally self-contained, and unreachable, but beautiful to watch. And some of them?the best ones?are doors.

This is pretty much the answer to every problem you encounter in suburbia: plant a tree, and hope you don't see anyone's privates.

It's the time of the night I like best, when most people are asleep and it feels like the world belongs completely to my friends and me, as though nothing exists apart from out little circle: everywhere else is darkness and quiet.

Maybe before you die, it's your ghosts you see.

Everything ends, people move on, they don't look back. It's how they should be.

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.

You have to learn that people are always listening.

In my head I try and reach back, through the fence, past the smoke; I try and grab his hand and pull. Alex, come back. There is nothing to do but sink. The hours close around me, encase me completely, like a tomb.

You have to understand. I am no one special. I am just a single girl. I am five feet two inches tall and I am in-between in every way. But I have a secret. You can build walls all the way to the sky and I will find a way to fly above them. You can try to pin me down with a hundred thousand arms, but I will find a way to resist.

We're on the other side of the fence now, Lena,' she says, tiredly, as she passes. "Don't you get it? You can't tell me what to feel.

I just want to be normal, like everybody else." "Are you sure that being like everybody else will make you happy?

Nothing exists but him.

willing me to understand: that people should be sacrificed to causes, that beauty can be built on the backs of the dead.

It was all very strange, Mr. Gray thought, as he wiped the coffee canister clean with a sponge. Very, very mysterious. You were born; you lived a whole life; and at the end, you wound up in a coffee canister. "Ah, well," he said out loud quietly. "That's just the way things are. Life's a funny business." Death, he supposed, was the punch line.

Do the other kids make fun of you? For how you talk?' 'Sometimes.' 'So why don't you do something about it? You could learn to talk differently, you know.' But this is my voice. How would you be able to tell when I was talking?

Perhaps this was how the sparrows did it too; perhaps they were looking so hard at the peaks and tips of the new rooftops coated with dew, and the vast new horizon, that they only forgot that they did not know how to fly until they were already in midair.

This is the world we live in, a world of safety and happiness and order, a world without love. A world where children crack their heads on stone fireplaces and nearly gnaw off their tongues and the parents are concerned. Not heartbroken, frantic, desperate. Concerned, as they are when you fail mathematics, as they are when they are late to pay their taxes.

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.

We should be protected from the people who will leave us in the end, from all the people who will disappear or forget us.

What I meant was, you looked happier in the pictures.

Poetry isn't like any writing I've ever heard before. I don't understand all of it, just bits of images, sentences that appear half-finished, all fluttering together like brightly colored ribbons in the wind.

Po swirled upward from where it had been sitting, and floated over to the window. "When you go swimming and you put your head under the water," Po said, "and everything is strange and underwater-sounding, and strange and underwater-looking, you don't miss the air do you? You don't miss the above-water sounds and the above-water look. It's just different." "True." Liesl was quiet for a moment. Then she added, "But I bet you'd miss it if you were drowning. I bet you'd really miss the air then."

I start to back away before I do something wildly inappropriate, like jump on top of him.

Something must die so that others can live.

I don't know where to go. I don't know what comes now." "Don't worry," Will said. "We'll figure something out." Liesl managed to smile at him. She liked that word: *we*. It sounded warm and open, like a hug.

He Is looking at me through the smoke, across the fence. He never takes his eyes off me. His hair Is a crown of leaves, of thorns, of flames. His eyes are blazing with light, more light than all the lights in every city in the whole world, more light than we could ever invent If we had ten thousand billion years.

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.

Fourth period I have "life skills", which is what they call gym when you're old enough to be offended by forced physical activity (Elody thinks they should call it slavery instead, for accuracy).

I remember a story I once heard about drowning: that when you fall into cold water it's not that you drown right away but that the cold disorients you and makes you think that down is up and up is down, so you may be swimming, swimming, swimming for your life in the wrong direction, all the way toward the bottom until you sink. That's how I feel, as though everything has been turned around.