Lauren Oliver

“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.”

“Droplets, droplets: We are all identical drips and drops of people, hovering, waiting to be tipped, waiting for someone to show us the way, to pour us down a path....He has tipped us over, all of us in our teetering expectancy, and now we are pouring toward him, coursing on a wave of sound, of roaring shouts and applause....They are the moon; we are a tide, their tide, and under their direction we will wipe clean all the sickness and blight from the world.”

“I thought the Invalids were beasts; I thought they would rip me apart. But these people saved me, and gave me the softest place to sleep, and nursed me back to health, and haven't asked for anything in return. The animals are on the other side of the fence: monsters wearing uniforms. They speak softly, and tell lies, and smile as they're slitting your throat.”

“There's a place for everything and everyone, you know. That is the mistake they make above. They think that only certain people have a place. Only certain kinds of people belong. The rest is waste. But even waste must have a place. Otherwise it will clog and clot, and rot and fester.”

“Here's something else you might as well learn now: If you want something, if you take it for your own, you'll always be taking it from someone else. That's a rule too. And something must die so that others can live.”

“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.”

“The priests and the scientists are right about one thing: At our heart, at our base, we are no better than animals.”

“A world without love is also a world without stakes.”

“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?”

“I reach out and grab her wrist. It feels impossibly tiny in my hand, like this one time I found a baby bird near goose Point, and I picked it up and it died there, taking its final gasping fluttering breaths in my palm.”

“There are so many things I want to tell her, so many things she doesn't know; like how I remember when she first came home from the hospital, a big pink blob with a perma-smile, and she used to fall asleep while grabbing on to my pinter finger; how I sued to give her piggyback rides up and down the beach on Cape Cod, and she would tub on my ponytail to direct me one way or the other; how soft and furry her head was when she was first born; that the first time you kiss someone you'll be nervous, and it will be weird, and it won't be as good as you want it to be, and that's okay; how you should only fall in love with people who will fall in love back... I feel an ache in my throat, but i manage to smile. Two conflicting desires go through me at the same time, each as sharp as a razor blade: I want to see you grow up and Don't ever change.”

“People need other people to feel things for them," she said. "It gets lonely to feel things all by yourself.”

“I told you," he whispers back. I can feel his breath just tickling the space behind my ear, making my hair prick up on my neck. "I like you.""You don't know me," I say quickly."I want to, though.”

“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.”

“People could push and pull at you, and poke you, and probe as deep as they could go. They could even tear you apart, bit by bit. But at the heart and root and soul of you, something would remain untouched.”

“My heart is fluid and soaring. There's no longer any space between heartbeats.”

“...into hate, into refusal, against hope and without fear”

“I feel an overwhelming rush of sadness... I'm just struck with a sense of time passing so quickly, rushing forward. One day I'll wake up and my whole life will be behind me, and it will seem to have gone as quickly as a dream.”

“It's like there's a filter set up in my brain, except instead of making things better, it twists everything around so what comes out of my mouth is totally wrong, totally different from what I was thinking.”

“I know the rules. I've been living here longer than you have."He cracks a smile then. He nudges me back. "Hardly.""Born and raised. You're a transplant." I nudge him again, a little harder, and he laughs and tries to catch hold of my arm. I squirm away, giggling, and he stretches out to tickle my stomach. "Country bumpkin!" I squeal, as he grabs out and wrestles me back onto the blanket, laughing."City slicker," he says, rolling over on top of me, and then kisses me. Everything dissolves: heat, explosions of color, floating.”

“I'd rather die on my own terms than live on theirs. I'd rather die loving Alex than live without him.”

“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.”

“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.”

“He is my world and my world is him and without him there is no world.”

“Are you sure you can't dematerialize? Not even a little?" "I'm sure.”

“I’ll tell you another secret, this one for your own good. You may think the past has something to tell you. You may think that you should listen, should strain to make out its whispers, should bend over backward, stoop down low to hear its voice breathed up from the ground, from the dead places. You may think there’s something in it for you, something to understand or make sense of.But I know the truth: I know from the nights of Coldness. I know the past will drag you backward and down, have you snatching at whispers of wind and the gibberish of trees rubbing together, trying to decipher some code, trying to piece together what was broken. It’s hopeless. The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone.Take it from me: If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging at your back and running its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do—the only thing—is run.”

“I’ve learned to get really good at this—say one thing when I’m thinking about something else, act like I’m listening when I’m not, pretend to be calm and happy when really I’m freaking out. It’s one of the skillsyou perfect as you get older. You have to learn that people are always listening.”

“Alex loved books. He was the one who first introduced me to poetry. That's another reason I can't read anymore.”

“They haven't killed us yet," I say, and I imagine that one day I will fly a plane over Portland, over Rochester, over every fenced-in city in the whole country, and I will bomb and bomb and bomb, and watch all their buildings smoldering to dust, and all those people melting and bleeding into flame, and I will see how they like it. If you take, we will take back. Steal from us, and we will rob you blind. When you squeeze, we will hit. This is the way the world is made now.”

“And I have Julian. I found him, and he followed me. I reach out in the half dark, wordlessly, and find his hands. We interlace our fingers, and though he doesn't say anything either, I can feel the warmth and energy passing between us, a soundless dialogue. Thank you, he is saying, and I am saying, I am so happy, I am so happy, I needed you to be safe. ”

“I want to know." His words are a whisper, barely audible. "I want to know with you.”

“It is a ruined-world, a nonsense-place.”

“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”

“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.”

“Everything looks stark and vivid and frozen, as though drawn precisely and outlined in ink - parents' smiles frozen, camera flashes blinding, mouths open and white teeth glinstening, dark glossy hair and deep blue sky and unrelenting light, everyone drowning in light - everything so clear and perfect I'm sure it must already be a memory, or a dream.”

“Amor deliria nervosa. The deadliest of all deadly things.”

“So how's Cupid Day treating you?" He pops a mint in his mouth and leans closer. It grosses me out, like he thinks he can seduce me with fresh breath. "Any big romantic plans tonight? Got someone special to cozy up next to?" He raises his eyebrows at me.[...]"We'll see," I say, smiling. "What about you? Are you going to be all by your lonesome? Table for one?"He leans forward even more, and I stay perfectly still, willing myself not to pull away."Now why would you assume that?" He winks at me, obviously thinking that this is my version of flirting--like I'm going to offer to keep this company or something.I smile even wider. "Because if you had a real girlfriend," I say, quietly but clearly, so he can hear every word perfectly, "you wouldn't be hitting on high school girls.”

“Love will turn the whole world into something greater than itself.”

“Both of us will die today, gunned down or smashed up or exploded in some terrible moment of fire and twisted metal, and when they go to bury us we'll be so melted together and entwined they won't be able to separate the bodies; pieces of him will go with me, and pieces of me will go with him.”

“Nadie puede decirnos que no. Nadie puede detenernos. Nos hemos elegido el uno al otro y el resto del mundo se puede ir a la mierda.”

“Durante un momento siento una punzada de tristeza. Ya he tenido que renunciar a tanto, a tantas vidas y a tantos yos… He crecido y he resurgido de los escombros de mis antiguas vidas, de las cosas y las personas a las que he amado.”

“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”

“I’ve been trying so hard not to think his name, not to even breathe the idea of him”

“Entonces se me ocurre que las personas mismas están llenas de túneles: sinuosos espacios oscuros y cavernas imposibles de conocer. Imposibles incluso de imaginar.”

“Nunca me olvidare de cómo me sentí cuando tomo aliento, cuando le volvió el color a la piel rápidamente. Era como si el mundo entero se hubiera partido en dos, y todo lo que yo sentía que faltaba: el sentimiento, el colorido… Todo aquello me llegara con su primer aliento. La llame Blue para acordarme siempre de aquel momento, para no olvidarlo nunca.”

“Behind us the door creaks open, and I turn around, expecting Raven, just as a voice cuts through the air: “Don’t believe her.”The whole world closes around me, like an eyelid: For a moment, everything goes dark.I am falling. My ears are full of rushing; I have been sucked into a tunnel, a place of pressure and chaos. My head is about to explode.He looks different. He is much thinner, and a scar runs from his eyebrow all the way down to his jaw. On his neck, just behind his left ear, a smalltattooed number curves around the three-pronged scar that fooled me, for so long, into believing he was cured. His eyes—once a sweet, melted brown,like syrup—have hardened. Now they are stony, impenetrable.Only his hair is the same: that auburn crown, like leaves in autumn.Impossible. I close my eyes and reopen them: the boy from a dream, from a different lifetime. A boy brought back from the dead.Alex.”

“Esa es la desventaja de la libertad: cuando eres completamente libre, también estás completamente solo.”

“I know the past will drag you backward and down, have you snatching at whispers of wind and the gibberish of trees rubbing together, trying to decipher some code, trying to piece together what was broken. It's hopeless. The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside you like a stone.”

“It's like high school holds two different worlds, revolving around each other and never touching; the haves and the have-nots. I guess it's a good thing. High school is supposed to prepare you for the real world, after all.”

“I get that rush that comes when you know you're doing something wrong and are getting away with it, like stealing from the school cafeteria of getting tipsy at a family holiday without anyone knowing it.”