Lauren Oliver

“You can try to pin me down with a hundred thousand arms, but I will find a way to resist”

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

“This is the strange way of the world, that people who simply want to love are instead forced to become warriors.”

“The worst is knowing I can't tell anybody what's happening -or what's happened- to me. Not even my mom.”

“She was mine before she was yours.”

“I'm so tired after dinner I fall asleep with my clothes on, almost as soon as my head hits the pillow, and so I forget to ask God, in my prayers, to keep me from waking up.”

“You can't tell me what to feel”

“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.”

“Grief is like sinking, like being buried.”

“I'm a nonperson, a shadow, a ghost. Even before the accident I'm not sure that I was a whole person - that's what I'm realizing now. And I'm not sure where the damage begins.”

“There's still always the possibility that I've gone totally, clinically cuckoo. But somehow I don't think so anymore.An article I once read said that crazy people don't worry about being crazy - that's the whole problem.”

“Look, I'm not going to have sex with him just so he'll say that he loves me, you know?"...That isn't why I was planning to have sex with Rob - to hear the words, I mean. I just wanted to get it over with. I think. Actually, I'm not sure why it seemed so important.”

“It's like the idea of him is better than the him of him.”

“My boyfriend's an idiot," I say as soon as he lurches away."A cute idiot," Ally corrects me."That's like saying 'a cute mutant.' Doesn't exist.”

“That was what her parents did not understand—and had never understood—about stories. Liza told herself storied as though she was weaving and knotting an endless rope. Then, no matter how dark or terrible the pit she found herself in, she could pull herself out, inch by inch and hand over hand, on the long rope of stories.”

“Life isn't life if you just float through it.”

“Quien trata de alcanzar el cielo de un salto puede caerse, es cierto. Pero también puede que vuele.”

“Mmm, butt bagels." Elody reaches into the bag and pulls out a bagel, half squashed, then makes a big deal of taking an enormous bite out of it. "Taste like Victoria's Secret.""Taste like thong floss," I say."Taste like crack," Lindsay says."Taste like fart," Elody says, and Lindsay spits coffee on the dashboard, and I start laughing and can't stop, and all the way to school we're thinking of flavors for butt bagels, and I'm thinking that this---my life, my friends---might be weird or screwy or imperfect or damaged or whatever, but it's never seemed better to me.”

“Holy mother of Lord Cocoa Puffs”

“Not gray, exactly. Right before the sun rises there's a moment when the whole sky goes this pale nothing color-not really gray but sort of, or sort of white, and I've always really liked it because it reminds me of waiting for something good to happen.”

“All human eyes are useless. You see only what you expect to see, and nothing more; and what is the use of sight like that?”

“Let me show you”

“Don't you get it? You can't tell me what to feel.”

“I'm gone, lost, floating away into nothingness like I am in my dream, but this time it's a good feeling - like soaring, like being totally free, and I can feel the impression of his fingers everywhere that they touch, and I think of stars streaking through the sky and leaving burning trails behind them, and in that moment - however long it lasts, seconds, minutes, days - while he's saying my name into my mouth and I'm breathing into him, I realize this, right here, is the first and only time I've ever been kissed in my life.”

“Running is a mental sport, more than anything else. You're only as good as your training, and your training is only as good as your thinking.”

“I keep having the urge to cross my hands over my chest, to cover up my breasts, to hide. I'm suddenly aware of how pale I look in the sunshine, and how many moles I have spotting up and down my chest, and I just know he's looking at me thinking i'm wrong or deformed. But the he breathes, 'Beautiful' and when his eyes meet mine I know that he really, truly means it.”

“I wish I could close my eyes and beblown into dust and nothingness, feel all my thoughts disperse like dandelion fluff drifting off on the wind.”

“That's the beauty of the cure. No one mentions those lost, hot days in the field, when Thomas kissed Rachel's tears away and invented worlds just so he could promise them to her, when she tore the skin off her own arm at the thought of living without him.”

“Qué complejo es todo, cómo se conecta y entreteje como una red gigantesca e invisible. A veces piensas que estás tomando la decisión correcta y terminas por provocar una catástrofe, y otras veces ocurre justo lo contrario”

“Tal vez tú puedas permitirte el lujo de esperar. Tal vez para ti haya un mañana. Tal vez para ti haya mil mañanas, o tres mil, o diez mil, y te quede tanto tiempo que puedas bañarte en él, entretenerte, dejar que se te escurra entre los dedos. Tanto tiempo que puedas desperdiciarlo.Pero para otras personas, solo queda un hoy. ¿Y sabes qué? Es imposible saber a cuál de los dos grupo perteneces”

“Hope keeps you alive.”

“I have had to give up so much, so many selves and lives already. I have grown up and out of the rubble of my old lives, of things and people I have cared for....”

“How can someone have the power to shatter you to dust--and also to make you feel so whole?”

“...the reason you can never go home again isn't necessarily that places change, but that people do.”

“If you cross a line and nothing happens, the line loses meaning.”

“Men saker och ting förändras när man dör - eftersom det i stort sett är det mest ensamma man kan göra, antar jag.”

“No one can tell us no. No one can make us stop. We have picked each other, and the rest of the world can go to hell.”

“I'm glad the choice is made for us. I'm glad I don't have to choose-but more than that, I'm glad I don't have to make someone else choose me.”

“He looked at me like I was beautiful.”

“I need to live my life in the light of their deaths. I need to live.”

“Every choice is limited. That's life.”

“That was half a year and a lifetime ago. For a second I feel a rush of sadness: for the horizons that vanish behind us, for the people we leave behind, the tiny-doll selves that get stored away and ultimately buried.”

“I've known time to stretch out like rings expanding outward over water; I've also known it to rush by with such force it leaves me dizzy. But until today I've never known it to do both at the same time. The minutes seem to swell around me, to stifle me with their sluggishness... At the same time. I'm terrified when I see how many hours have gone by... and even as each minute seems to take an hour, each hour seems to fly by in a minute.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Love obeysno laws other than its own.”

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

“Could it be? Samantha Kingston? Home? On a Friday?” I roll my eyes. “I don’t know. Did you do a lot of acid in the sixties? Could be a flashback.” “I was two years old in 1960. I came too late for the party.” He leans down and pecks me on the head. I pull away out of habit. “And I’m not even going to ask how you know about acid flashbacks.” “What’s an acid flashback?” Izzy crows. “Nothing,” my dad and I say at the same time, and he smiles at me.”

“Maybe Lindsay and I are best friends and we hate each other, both. Maybe I’m only one math class away from being a slut like Anna Cartullo. Maybe I am like her, deep down. Maybe we all are: just one lunch period away from eating alone in the bathroom. 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.”

“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.”