Top 540 Quotes & Sayings by Lauren Oliver - Page 7

It's the way he says my name: like music.

It's amazing how words can do that, just shred your insides apart. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me - such bullshit.

We're killers, all of us: We kill our lives, our past selves, the things that mattered. We bury them under slogans and excuses.

Happiness is found when no one is looking

"Kent?" I say, and my voice seems to have to rise from inside the fog, taking forever to get from my brain to my mouth. "Yeah?" "Promise you'll stay here with me?" I say. "I promise," he whispers.

A string of bright white buildinh, glistening like teeth over the slurping mouth of the ocean.

The old Lena is dead.

The salt blowing off the sea makes the air feel textured and heavy.

Be honest: Are you surprised that I didn't realize sooner? Are you surprised that it took me so long to even /think/ the word -- death? Dying? Dead? Do you think I was being stupid? Naive? Try not to judge. Remember that we're the same, you and me. I thought I would live forever too.

"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."

They've lied about everything.-about the fence, and the existence of Invalids, about a million other things besides. They told us the raids were carried out for our own protection. They told us the regulators were only interested in keeping the peace. They told us love was a disease. They told us it would kill us in the end. For the very first time I realize, that this, too, maight also be a lie.

I'm not scared, if that's what you're wondering. The moment of death is full of sound and warmth and light shooting away, arcing up and up and up, and if singing were a feeling it would be this, this light, this lifting, like laughing... The rest you have to find out for yourself.

I used to lie here like this all summer long,' I tell her. 'I'd come up here and just stare at the sky.' She rolls over on her back so she's staring up as well. 'Bet this view hasn't changed much, has it?' What she says is so simple i almost laugh. She's right, of course. 'No. This looks exactly the same.' 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.

i feel like a curtain has dropped away and i'm seeing people for who they really are, different, and sharp, and unknowable.

Mama, Mama, help me get home I'm out in the woods, I am out on my own. I found me a werewolf, a nasty old mutt It showed me its teeth and went straight for my gut. Mama, Mama, help me get home I'm out in the woods, I am out on my own. I was stopped by a vampire, a rotting old wreck It showed me its teeth and went straight for my neck. 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. -From "A Child's Walk Home," Nursery Rhymes and Folk Tales

That's the thing about faith. It works.

It's too late. I've seen things...I've lost things you can't understand.

I cry for everything I abandoned and because I, too, have been left behind -- by Alex, by my mom, by time that has cut through our worlds and separated us.

He’s speaking in the tone of voice that everyone uses when they’re about to break you apart. Gentle—kind, even—like they can make the news sound better just by speaking in a lullaby voice.

This is what we are made for: promises, pledges, and sworn oaths of obedience.

I think of the quietness of Julian's voice as he said I love you, the steadiness of his rib cage rising and falling against my back, as we sleep.I love you, Julian. But the words don't come.

And now I realize Lindsay's not fearless. She's terrified. She's terrified that people will find out she's faking, bullshitting her way through life, pretending to have everything together when really she's just floundering like the rest of us. Lindsay, who will bite at you if you even look in her direction the wrong way, like on of those tiny attack dogs that are always barking and snapping in the air before they're jerked backward on the chains that keep them in one place.

I'm starved for different light, a different sun,different sky.

But maybe you carried your demons with you everywhere, the way you carried your shadow.

My boyfriend's an idiot," I say as soon as he lurches away."A cute idiot," Ally corrects me."That's like saying 'a cute mutant.' Doesn't exist.

But hope got in, no matter how hard and fast I tried to stomp it out. Like these tiny fire ants we used to get in Portland. No matter how fast you liked them, there were always more, a steady stream of them, resistant, ever-multiplying. Maybe, the hope said. Maybe.

This is what happens when you try to help people. You get screwed.

I will make a pact with you: I will do it if you will do it, always and forever. Take down the walls.

For all the people who have infected me with amor deliria nervosa in the past - you know who you are. For the people who will infect me in the future - I can't wait to see who you'll be. And in both cases: Thank you.

Maybe, the hope said. Maybe.

Most of us won't see one another after graduation, and even if we do it will be different. We'll be different. We'll be adults--cured, tagged and labeled and paired and identified and placed neatly on our life path, perfectly round marbles set to roll down even, well-defined slopes.

That's the way I feel, at least: like there's a real me and a reflection of me, and I have no way of telling which is which.

People are like houses. They could open their doors. You could walk through their rooms and touch the objects hidden in their corners. But something--the structure, the wiring, the invisible mechanism that kept the whole thing standing--remai ned invisible, suggested only by the fact of its existing at all.

But it's not about knowing. It is simply about going forward.

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

I used to think that's what love was: knowing someone so well he was like a part of you.

It's not my fault I can't be like you, okay? I don't get up in the morning thinking the world is one big, shiny, happy place, okay? That's just not how I work. I don't think I can be fixed.

But that's the beauty of life: time is yours to keep and to change. Just a few minutes can be sufficient to carve a new road, a new track. Just a few minutes, and the void is kept at bay. You will live forever with that new road inside of you, stretching away to a place suggested, barely, on the horizon. For the shortest time, shorter than the shortest second's breath, you get to stand up to infinity. But eventually, and always, infinity wins.

For a second, I feel a sense of overwhelming grief: for how things change, for the fact that we can never go back. I'm not certain of anything anymore. I don't know what will happen--

Requiem has been controversial because people dont feel I gave it closure.

I thought if I followed the rules, things would turn out all right. that's the thing about the cure, isn't it? It isn't just about deliria at all. It's about order. A path for everyone. You just have to follow it and everything will be okay. That's what the DFA is about. That's what I belevied in-what I've had to believe in. Because otherwise, it's just...chaos.

The house, the pond, the tree-it was all both overwhelmingly familiar and different from what she remembered-smaller and shabbier, somehow. It was like waking up to find that your reflection in the mirror had aged overnight, or had sprouted a new mole: You were forced to admit that things changed, whether you gave them permission to or not.

Popularity's a weird thing. You can't really define it, and it's not cool to talk about, but you know it when you see it. Like a lazy eye, or porn.

Here's another thing to remember: hope keeps you alive. Even when you're dead, it's the only thing that keeps you alive.

I can admit, now, that I must have loved Lena. Not in an Unnatural way, but my feelings for her must have been a kind of sickness. How can someone have the power to shatter you to dust--and also to make you feel so whole?

I hate both of my parents right now: for sitting quietly in our house, while out in the darkness my heart was beating away all of the seconds of my life, ticking them off one by one until my time was up; for letting the thread between us stretch so far and so thin that the moment it was severed for good they didn't even feel it.

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

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

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.

So are you going to be my knight in shining armor or what?' Kent does a little bow. 'You know I can't resist a damsel in distress.

The whole point of growing up is learning to stay on the laughing side.

It was unfair that people could pretend to be one thing when they were really something else. That they would get you on their side and then do nothing but fail, and fail, and fail again. People should come with warnings, like cigarette packs: involvement would kill you over time.

It's Connecticut: being like the people around you is the whole point.

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

Each step is more difficult than the last; the heaviness fills me and turns my limbs to stone. You must hurt or be hurt.

...the past: It drifts, it gathers. If you are not careful, it will bury you. This is half the reason for the cure: It clean-sweeps; it makes the past, and all its pain, distant, like the barest impression on sparkling glass.

I vowed after that day that I would be your hero too, no matter how long it took

No one can tell us no. No one can make us stop. We have picked each other and the rest of the world can go to hell.

Maybe next time, but probably not.

This was what true fear was--that you could never know other people, not completely. That you were always just guessing blind.