Lauren Oliver

“Direction, like time, is a general thing, the deprived of boundaries and borders. It is an endless process interception and reinterception, doubling back and adjusting.”

“People do terrible things, sometimes, for the best reasons.”

“anything, anything is possible, if you can just see the sky.”

“That's what Zombieland is: frozen, calm, quiet.”

“it seemed a lifetime ago i'd lain in bed with Lena and felt her breath tickling my chin and held her while she slept, felt her heart beating through her skin to mine.it was a lifetime ago. everything was different.”

“you have to understand. i wasn't just thinking of me. i was thinking of her, too.”

“only when it rains. and sometimes, too, when i remember.”

“How did I love her?Let me count the ways.The freckles on her nose like the shadow of a shadow; the way she chewed on her lower lip when she walked and how when she ran she looked like she was born going fast and how she fit perfectly against my chest; her smell and the touch of her lips and her skin, which was always warm, and how she smiled.Like she had a secret.How she always made up words during Scrabble. Hyddym (secret music). Grofp (cafeteria food). Quaw (the sound a baby duck makes). How she burped her way through the alphabet once, and I laughed so hard I spat out soda through my nose.And how she looked at me like I could save her from everything bad in the world.This was my secret: she was the one who saved me.”

“I wasn't just thinking of me. I was thinking of her, too.”

“that's what it was like waking up in the crypts. no-longer-dead. but without her.like burning alive.”

“I screamed until my voice dried up in my throat. We all did. All of us in Ward Six, all of us forgotten, left to rot.”

“Funny how time heals. Like that bullet in my ribs. It's there, I know it's there, but I can barely feel it at all anymore.”

“He cut the insides of my eyelids with razors.”

“He liked to put his cigarettes out on my tongue.”

“Of course. That's what people do in a disordered world, a world of freedom and choice: they leave when they want. They disappear, they come back, they leave again. And you are left to pick up the pieces on your own.”

“Let me tell you something about dying: it's not as bad as they says.it's the coming-back-to-life part that hurts.”

“This is how Tack and Raven work: It’s their private language of push and return, argument and concession. With the cure, relationships are all the same, and rules and expectations are defined. Without the cure, relationships must be reinvented every day, languages constantly decoded and deciphered.”

“Now, after so many years, I understand what the Coldness was and where it came from—this sense that everything is lost, and worthless, and meaningless.”

“All of you, wherever you are: in your spiny cities, or your one-bump towns. Find it, the hard stuff, thelinks of metal and chink, the fragments of stone filling your stomach. And pull, and pull, and pull.I will make a pact with you: I will do it if you will do it, always and forever.Take down the walls.”

“But how could anyone who's ever seen a summer - big explosion of green and skies lit up electric with splashy sunsets, a riot of flowers and wind that smells like honey - pick the snow?”

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

“That's the thing about faith. It works.”

“. . . Liesl & Po is the embodiment of what writing has always been for me at its purest and most basic - not a paycheck, certainly; not an idea, even; and not an escape. Actually, it is the opposite of an escape; it is a way back in, a way to enter and make sense of a world that occasionally seems harsh and terrible and mystifying, And, of course, it is a way of finding a happy ending - even, or especially, when the happy ending is denied me in real life. Let it be an escape for its readers. For me, it is a way of not letting go.”

“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.”

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

“He has had to learn to hide it, even more than most of us. Somewhere, I think, there is a center to him. It glows like a coal being slowly crushed into diamond, weighed down by layers and layers of surface.”

“I don't understand how everything changes, how the layers of your life get buried. Impossible. At some point, at some time, we must all explode.”

“This is not the person I wanted to become: Hatred has carved a permanent place inside me, a hollow where things are so easily lost.”

“‎And still the sun rises and clouds mass and drift and people shop for groceries and toilets flush and blinds go up and down. 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.”

“Segregation has it all wrong. We should be protected from the people who will leave us in the end, from all the people who will disappear or forget us.”

“Soltanto dopo ho cominciato a pensare al tempo, a come continua a muoversi ed esaurirsi e scorrere in eterno, secondi che diventano minuti che diventano giorni che diventano anni, e tutti portano alla stessa meta, una corrente che scorre sempre in una sola direzione. E noi tutti la seguiamo nuotando il più veloce possibile, aiutandola a fluire. Quel che voglio dire è: forse voi potete permettervi di aspettare. Forse per voi un domani c’è. Forse avete mille domani, o tremila, o dieci, tanto tempo da poterci sguazzare, rotolare, dilapidarlo come monete. Tanto tempo da poterlo sprecare.Ma per qualcuno di noi c’è soltanto l’oggi. E la verità è che non si può mai sapere con certezza.”

“For a second I think about how easy it would be to pass back to the other side, to walk straight into the laboratories and offer myself up to the surgeons.You were right; I was wrong. Get it out.”

“She understood then, too, that everyone drowns differently and that for everyone - even ghosts - there is a different kind of air. Chapter 15”

“Alex's T-shirt is red, and for a second I think it's a trick of the light, but then I realise he's drenched, soaked in blood: blood seeping across his chest, like the stain seeping up the sky, bringing another day to the world. Behind him is that insect army of men, all running toward him at once, guns drawn. The guards are coming too, reaching for him from both sides.....The helicopter has him fixed in it's spotlight. He is standing white and still and frozen in its beam, and I don't think I have ever, in my life, seen anything more beautiful than him.”

“His eyes are the color of honey. These are the eyes I remember from my dreams.”

“He's actually not that good with breasts in general, actually. I mean, it's not like I really know what it's supposed to feel like, but every time he touches my boobs he kind of just massages them hard in a circle. My guno does the same thing when I go in for an exam, so one of them has to be doing it wrong. And to be honest, I don't think it's my gyno.”

“I'll find you," he says, watching me with the eyes I remember. "I won't let you go again”

“For a second something deep and old rises inside me and I could fall on the ground and weep for joy, or open up my arms and spin. After being enclosed for so long, I want to drink in all the space, all the bright, empty air stretching around me on all sides.”

“Love. I love you. I’ll always love you, my love. You are the love of my life.”

“Ants are driven by fear.”

“It’s one of the reasons I love him.”

“Here are the top three things I’ve learned in my twenty-two years on the planet:1. Never wipe your butt with poison ivy.2. People are like ants: Just a few of them give all the orders. And most of them spend their lives getting squashed.3. There are no happy endings, only breaks in the regular action.Of all of them, number three is really the only one you have to keep in mind”

“And we did, and it wasn’t bad. We ate the whole stupid can, we were so hungry. And when it started to get dark you pointed to the sky, and toldme there was a star for every thing you loved about me.” I’m gasping, feeling as though I am about to drown; I’m reaching for him blindly, grabbing athis collar.”

“If you draw a circle, there will always be an inside and an outside, and unless you're a total nut job, it's pretty easy to see which is which. It just happens.”

“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.”

“Everyone just wasting time because they have so much of it to waste, minutes slipping by on who's with who and did you hear.”

“Take down the walls.”

“They say that in the old days, love drove people to madness. The deadliest of all deadly things: It kills you both when you have it, and when you don't.”

“I am now officially married to Fred Hargrove. Nothing will ever be the same.”