Lauren Oliver

“This is the past: It drifts, it gathers. If you are not careful, it will bury you.”

“Raven jerks and stiffens. For a second, I think she is only surprised: Her mouth goes round, her eyeswide.Then she begins teetering backward, and I know that she is dead. Falling, falling, falling . . .”

“He was still in love with you, anyway.”

“And even if she isn’t—even if by some miracle, she survived the escape and has been squeezing out a living in the Wilds—she would never join forces with the resisters. She would never be violent or vengeful. Not Lena, who used to practically faint when she pricked a finger, who couldn’t even lie to a teacher about being late. She wouldn’t have the stomach for it.”

“We’ll go.” Her voice is surprisingly deep and forceful. Set in her sunken, shipwreck face, her eyes burn like two smoldering coals. “We’ll fight.”

“I’m sorry,” he repeats again, too low for Raven and Tack to hear. “I’m sorry for everything.”

“If Cassie was invalidated because she caught the disease, or because Fred suspected her of it, I can only imagine what he will do to me and to my family if he discovers that the cure did not work perfectly.”

“He who jumps may fall, but he may also fly.It’s time to jump.”

“We leave Pippa behind, standing in the dark, teeming bowels of the camp, while the sun begins to stain the sky electric, and from all sides the guns draw closer.”

“The mark of the procedure. A real one.Lu is cured.”

“There are some losses we never get over.”

“Cassie asked too many questions.”

“I’m with Julian,” I say at last. This, after all, is what I have chosen.”

“I close my eyes. An image flashes—emerging from the van with Julian after our escape from New York City; believing, in that moment, that we had escaped the worst, that life would begin again for us.Instead life has only grown harder.”

“For a moment, my heart aches for him. I should never have asked him to join me here; I shouldnever have asked him to cross.”

“Because if it weren’t for me, Lena and Alex would never have been caught at all.I told on them.I was jealous.”

“Until, one day, she wasn’t.”

“I think of Grace and feel a sharp pain in my chest.”

“For a split second, he had looked almost like my Alex again.”

“Thisis the language of the world before—a world of chaos and confusion and happiness and despair—beforethe blitz turned streets to grids, cities to prisons, and hearts to dust.”

“This is the first day of my new beginning. From now on I'm going to do things right. I'm going to be a different person, a good person. I'm going to be the kind of person who would be remembered well, not just remembered.”

“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.”

“I was still looking for answers then. I still wanted to know why. As though somebody was going to answer that for me, as though any answer would be satisfying.”

“Right before the sun rises there's a moment when the whole sky goes this pale nothing color and I've always liked it because it reminds me of waiting for something good to happen”

“The thing is, you don't get to know. It's not like you wake up with a bad feeling in your stomach. You don't see shadows where there shouldn't be any. You don't remember to tell your parents you love them or--in my case--remember to say good-bye to them at all.”

“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.”

“Love is the only thing in the world worth having. You must never loose it or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.”

“That's my favorite thing about him. I like to lie next to him when it's late, dark, and so quiet I can hear my own heartbeat. It's times like that when I'm sure that I'm in love.”

“Walking into parties always gives me a crampy feeling at the bottom of my stomach. Its a good feeling though: The feeling of knowing anything can happen. Most of the time nothing does, of course. Most of the time one night blends into the next, and weeks blend into weeks, and months into other months. And sooner or later we die.”

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

“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.”

“There were always the birds”

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

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

“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.”

“Still, the vivid green of the grass-where the grass is actually managing to assert itself through the dirt-seems out of place.This seems like a place where the sun should never shine: a place on the edge, at the limit, a place completely removed from time and happiness and life.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“For the first time in my life I've done something for me and by choice and not because somebody told me it was good or bad.”

“Before, Alex seemed far away. Now the room is full of him: He is so close I can't breathe...move or speak or think. Every time he brushes me with his fingers, time seems to teeter for a second, like it is in danger of dissolving. The whole world is dissolving, I decide, except for us. Us.”

“But now I give in, let the anger surge. I'm sick of people acting like this world, this other world is the normal one, while I'm the freak. It's not fair; like all the rules have suddenly changed and somebody forgot to tell me.”

“I didn't even know a heart could beat so loudly...it reminds me of an Edgar Allen Poe story we had to read in one of our...classes...it's supposed to be a story about guilt and the dangers of civil disobedience, but when I first read it I thought it seemed kind of lame and melodramatic. Now I get it, though. Poe must have snuck out a lot when he was young.”

“Someday she will be saved, and the past and all its pain will be rendered as smoothly palatable as the food we spoon to our babies.”

“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.”

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

“They didn’t get me, I should have said. They saved me.”

“Fred is officially the mayor of Portland now.”