Lauren Oliver

“Nobody ever said life was fair.”

“i press my hands against his chest, wishing i could somehow be even closer to him. i hate skin; i hate bones and bodies. i want to curl up inside of him and be carried there forever.”

“amazingly, i'd actually forgotten that i'm supposed to be plain. i'm so used to alex telling me i'm beautiful. i'm so used to feeling beautiful around him. a hollow opens up in my chest. this is what life will be like without him: everything will become ordinary again. i'll become ordinary again.”

“...los libros prohibidos son mucho más que eso. Algunos de ellos son redes; puedes ir siguiendo un camino, tanteando sus hilos con las manos, hasta llegar a rincones oscuros y extraños. Otros son globos que vuelan por el cielo dando bandazos: inalcanzables y totalmente ajenos, pero es bello mirarlos.Y algunos de ellos, los mejores, son puertas.”

“Eso es lo que hace el odio. Te alimenta y al mismo tiempo te va pudriendo.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Son las pasiones las que nos vuelven estúpidos animales”

“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.”

“Something aches at the very core of me, something ancient and deep and stronger than words: the filament that joins each of us to the root of existence, that ancient thing unfurling and resisting and grappling, desperately, for a foothold, a way to stay here, breathe, keep going.”

“It’s weird how much people change...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.”

“That's when you realize that most of it-life, the relentless mechanism of existing-isn't about you. It doesn't include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you've jumped the edge. Even after you're dead.”

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

“Pero se puede construir un futuro a partir de cualquier cosa; de un fragmento, de un parpadeo. Del deseo de avanzar lentamente, paso a paso.Se puede construir una cuidad etérea desde las ruinas.”

“No nace de pronto la nueva Lena.Nace paso a paso, y luego centímetro a centímetro.Arrastrándome, con las entrañas retorcidas hasta que parecen convertirse en polvo, con la boca llena de sabor a humo.Un dedo tras otro, como una oruga.Así es como viene al mundo esa nueva Lena.”

“There are more of us than you think.”

“Things change after you die, though, I guess because dying is the loneliest thing you can do.”

“people themselves are full of tunnels: winding, dark spaces and caverns; impossible to know all the places inside of them. Impossible even to imagine.”

“La limpieza está cercana a la divinidad. La seguridad está en los detalles. La felicidad está en el método.”

“Vive libre o muere.”

“Un mundo sin amor es también un mundo donde no hay nada en juego.”

“Somos cosas tan pequeñas, tan tontas…”

“El amor, la más letal de las cosas letales. El amor que mata. Tanto si lo tienes... como si no.”

“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.”

“Don't worry about what you're writing or whether it's good or even whether it makes sense.”

“It was as though the darkness was a sheet of raw cookie dough and someone had just taken a cookie cutter and made a child-sized shape out of it.”

“You have to go forward: It's the only way. You have to go forward no matter what happens. This is the universal law.”

“But you can build a future out of anything. A scrap, a flicker. The desire to go forward, slowly, one foot at a time. You can build an airy city out of ruins.”

“We all need mantras, I guess - stories we tell ourselves to keep us going.”

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

“Something must die sothat others can live.”

“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.”

“If you’re smart, you care. And if you care, you love.”

“This is the world we live in,a world of safety and happiness and order, a world withoutlove.A world where children crack their heads on stone fireplaces and nearly gnaw off theirtongues and the parents are concerned. Notheartbroken, frantic, desperate. Concerned, as they are when you fail mathematics, asthey are when they are late to pay their taxes.”

“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.”

“That’s just the kind of thing that kids do to each other. It’s no big deal. There’s always going to be a person laughing and somebody getting laughed at. It happens every day, in every school, in every town in America—probably in the world, for all I know. The whole point of growing up is learning to stay on the laughing side.”

“Some things are better left buried and forgotten.”

“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 cold things, and days that look like darkness.”

“..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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 need him to know that I came for him. I need him to know that somehow, at some point in the tunnels, I began to love him.”

“They’d already taken her from me once. I didn’t want to lose her again.”

“This is what hatred is. It will feed you and at the same time turn you to rot.”

“Maybe he sees it on my face, that fraction of a second whenI let my guard down, because in that moment his expression softens and his eyesgo bright as flame and even though I barely see him move, suddenly he hasclosed the space between us and he’s wrapping his warm hands over myshoulders—fingers so warm and strong I almost cry out—and saying, “Lena. Ilike you, okay? That’s it. That’s all. I like you.” His voice is so low and hypnoticit reminds me of a song. I think of predators dropping silently from trees: I thinkof enormous cats with glowing amber eyes, just like his.”

“Lena.” Alex’s voice is stronger, more forceful now, and it finally stops me.He turns so that we’re face-to-face. At that moment my shoes skim off the sandbottom, and I realize that the water is lapping up to my neck. The tide is comingin fast. “Listen to me. I’m not who—I’m not who you think I am.”I have to fight to stand. All of a sudden the currents tug and pull at me. It’salways seemed this way. The tide goes out a slow drain, comes back in a rush.“What do you mean?”His eyes—shifting gold, amber, an animal’s eyes—search my face, andwithout knowing why, I’m scared again. “I was never cured,” he says. For amoment I close my eyes and imagine I’ve misheard him, imagine I’ve onlyconfused the shushing of the waves for his voice. But when I open my eyes he’sstill standing there, staring at me, looking guilty and something else—sad,maybe?—and I know I heard correctly. He says, “I never had the procedure.”“You mean it didn’t work?” I say. My body is tingling, going numb, and Irealize then how cold it is. “You had the procedure and it didn’t work? Like whathappened to my mom?”“No, Lena. I—” He looks away, squinting, says under his breath, “I don’tknow how to explain.”