Top 540 Quotes & Sayings by Lauren Oliver - Page 9

It's going to be okay. Words that mean nothing. really, just sounds intoned into vastness and darkness, little scrabbling attempts to latch on to something when we're falling.

It's an incredible thing, how you can feel so taken care of by someone and yet feel, also, like you would die or do anything just for the chance to protect him back.

There are more of us than you think.

Everything I see and touch reminds me of him, and so everything I see and touch is perfect.

I'm overwhelmed with sadness for everything that was lost, and filled with anger toward the people who took it away. My people-or at least, my old people. I don't know who I am anymore, or where I belong. That's not totally true...I know I belong with Alex.

When we get out of highschool we'll look back and know we did everything right, that we kissed the cutest boys and went to the best parties, got in just enough trouble, listened to our music too loud, smoked too many cigarettes, and drank too much and laughed too much and listened too little, or not al all.

Love is a kind of possession. It’s a poison.

I loved to be alone in the woods, especially in the late fall when everything is crisp and golden, the leaves the color of fire, and it smells like things turning into earth. I loved the silence - the only sound the steady drum of the hooves and the horse's breathing.

The sun has just risen, weak and watery-looking, like it had just spilled itself over the horizon and is too lazy to clean itself up.

Less than a month ago all of August still stretched before us - long and golden and reassuring, like an endless period of delicious sleep.

My stomach gets that hollowed-out feeling. It's amazing how words can do that, just shred your insides apart.

No wonder the regulators decided on segregation of boys and girls: Otherwise, it would have been a nightmare, this feeling angry and self-conscious and confused and annoyed all the time.

There's that confidence again, that semi-infuriating easiness of his, the tilt of his head and the smile. but today it's not infuriating. Today I like it, feel like it's somehow rubbing off on me, like if I was around him enough I would never feel awkward or frightened or insecure.

He's stuck with me and I'm stuck with him. We're stuck. That's what growing up is all about, I guess.

Everytime he brushes me with his fingers, time seems to tether for a second, like it is in danger of dissolving. The whole world is dissolving, I decide, except for us. Us.

I want to be healed and whole and perfect again, like a misshapen slab of iron that comes out of the fire glowing, glittering, razor-sharp.

it's weird how much people change. for example, when i was a kid i loved all of these things..and over time all of them just fell away, one after another, replaced by friends and IMing and cell phones and boys and clothes. it's kind of sad, if you think about it. like there's no continuity in people at all. like something ruptures when you hit twelve, or thirteen, or whatever the age is when you're no longer a kid but a "young adult," and after that you're a totally different person. maybe even a less happy person. maybe even a worse one.

..in that moment i realize how much i love the little everyday routines of my life..the details that are my life's special pattern, like how in handwoven rugs what really makes them unique are the tiny flaws in the stitching, little gaps and jumps and stutters that can never be reproduced. so many things become beautiful when you really look.

No guest rooms.” I shake my head resolutely. “I want to be in a room room. A lived-in room.

The first time I saw you, at the Governor, I handn't been to watch the birds at the border in years. But that's what you reminded me of. You were jumping up, and you were yelling something, and your hair was coming loose from your ponytail, and you were so fast..." He shakes his head. "Just a flash, and then you were gone, Exactly like a bird.

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.

My heart shoots into my throat every time I think I see his loping walk, or catch sight of some floppy brown hair on a boy - but it's never him, and each time it isn't, my heart does a reverse trajectory down into the very pit of my stomach.

Every choice is limited. That's life.

She was mine before she was yours.

I’m sorry for everything.” Then he turns and pushes back into the woods, and he’s gone.

Unhappiness is bondage; therefore, happiness is freedom. The way to find happiness is through the cure. Therefore, it is only through the cure that one finds freedom.

I'm not ugly but I'm not pretty either. Everything is in-between. I have eyes that aren't green or brown, but a muddle. I'm not thin but I'm not fat either. the only thing you could definitely say about me is that: I'm short

Somewhere in the endless spinning of eternity that one, tiny, fraction of a second where our lips met is lost forever.

My former people were not totally wrong. Love is a kind of possession. It’s a poison. And if Alex no longer loves me, I can’t bear to think that he might love somebody else.

This is the language of the world before—a world of chaos and confusion and happiness and despair—before the blitz turned streets to grids, cities to prisons, and hearts to dust.

Are you sure that being like everybody else will make you happy?" "I don't know any other way." "Let me show you." And then we're kissing. Or at least, I think we're kissing—I've only seen it done a couple of times, quick closed-mouth pecks at weddings or on formal occasions. But this isn't like anything I've ever seen, or imagined, or even dreamed: this is like music or dancing but better than both.

For the first time in my life I actually feel sorry for Carol. I'm only seventeen years old, and I already know something she doesn't know: I know that life isn't life if you just float through it. I know that the whole point- the only point- is to find things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.

Sometimes I feel as though there are two me's, one coasting directly on top of the other: the superficial me, who nods when she's supposed to nod and says what she's supposed to say, and some other, deeper part, the part that worries and dreams... Most of the time they move along in sync and I hardly notice the split, but sometimes it feels as though I'm two whole different people and I could rip apart at any second.

....love and desire enjoy a symbiotic relationship, meaning that one cannot exist without the other. Desire is an enemy to contentment; desire is illness, a feverish brain. Who can be considered healthy who wants? The very word want suggests a lack, an impoverishment, and that is what desire is: an impoverishment of the brain, a flaw, a mistake.

The question was: Will you meet me tomorrow? And the word was: Yes.

Time jumps. It leaps. It pours away like water through fingers.

The Story of Solomon is the only way I know how to explain. And then, in smaller letters: Forgive me.

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, might also be a lie.

Over the past week, I’ve accepted that I will never love Julian as much as I loved Alex. But now that idea is overwhelming, like a wall between us. I will never love Julian like I love Alex.

Mary bring out your umbrella - The sun shines down on this fine, fine day But the ashes raining down forever Are going to turn your hair to gray. Mary keep your oars a-steady Sail away on the rising flood Keep your candle at the ready Red tides can't be told from blood. - "Miss Mary" (a common child's clapping game, dating from the time of the blitz), from Pattycake and Beyond: A History of Play

No guy in his right mind would ever choose me when there are people like Hana in the world: It would be like settling for a stale cookie when what you really want is a big bowl of ice cream, whipped cream and cherries and chocolate sprinkles included.

Hunky Heroes, rescuing distressed women, captive princesses, and girls without wheels since 1684. p. 450

And when I wake up it's wonderful, like I've been carried quietly onto a calm, peaceful shore, and the dream, and its meaning, has broken over me like a wave and is ebbing away now, leaving me with a single, solid certainty. I know now.

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

She liked that word: we. It sounded warm and open, like a hug.

It won't matter if nobody ever thinks I'm pretty (although sometimes I wish, just for a second, that somebody would)

"And I love you too." His fingers skate the edge of my jaw, dance briefly over my lips. "You should know that. You have to know that."

This is what I want. This is the only thing I've ever wanted. Everything else—every single second of every single day that has come before this very moment, this kiss—has meant nothing.

It's the rule of the wilds. You must be bigger, and stronger, and tougher. A coldness radiates through me, a solid wall that is growing, piece by piece, in my chest. He doesn't love me. He never loved me. It was all a lie. "The old Lena is dead." I say, and then push past him. Each step is more difficult than the last; the heaviness fills me and turns my limbs to stone. You must hurt or be hurt.

That's when you really lose people, you know.When the pain passes.

Two weeks until your cure" she says finally. "Sixteen days" I say, but in my head I'm counting: Seven days. Seven days until I'm free and away from all these people and their sliding superficial lives brushing past one another gliding, gliding, gliding from life to death. For them there's hardly a change between the two.

I'm used to a feeling of doubleness, of thinking one thing and having to do another, a constant tug-of-war.

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

I wonder if it's ever really possible to know the truth about someone else, or if the best we can do is just stumble into each other, heads down, hoping to avoid collision. I...wonder how many people are clutching secrets like little fists, little rocks sitting in the pits of their stomachs. All of them, maybe.

But the guilt goes even deeper than that. It, too, is dust: Layers and layers of it have accumulated. Because if it weren’t for me, Lena and Alex would never have been caught at all. I told on them. I was jealous. God forgive me, for I have sinned.

Amor deliria nervosa: It affects your mind so that you cannot think clearly, or make rational decisions about your own well-being. Symptom number twelve.

I am growing stronger. I am a stone being excavated by the slow passage of water; I am wood charred by a fire.

It's a miracle I was able to get out of the house today. It's a miracle I'm even wearing pants, a double miracle I remembered to wear shoes.

I’m not the Hana everyone told me I would be after my cure.

I know some of you are Thinking maybe I deserved it. But before you start pointing Fringers, let me ask you Is what I did really so bad? So bad I deserved to die? So bad I deserved to die like that? Is what I did really much worse Then what anybody else does? Is it really so much worse Than what you do?