Lauren Oliver

“Chance. Stupid, dumb, blind chance. Just a part of the strange mechanism of the world, with its fits and coughs and starts and random collisions.”

“They say that just before you die your whole life flashes before your eyes, but that's not how it happened for me.”

“I said that without love, there could also be no hate: without hate, no violence. Hate isn't the most dangerous thing, he'd said. Indifference is.”

“Someday all the wilds will be razed, and we will be left with a concrete landscape, a land of pretty houses and trim gardens and planned parks and forests, and a world that works as smoothly as a clock, neatly wound: a world of metal and gears, and people going tick-tick-tick to their deaths.”

“We're on the other side of the fence now, Lena,' she says, tiredly, as she passes. "Don't you get it? You can't tell me what to feel.”

“My father will pay,' [Julian] says after a beat. 'I'm valuable to the movement.' I don't say anything. 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.”

“All at once the hard, cold earth seemed to explode. The brown surface of the world dissolved and in its place was an impossible, an inconceivable, an unbelievable profusion of color: green grass and purple and red flowers; sprays of lily; white baby's breath that covered the hills; nodding fields of bright yellow daffodils; rich purple moss. The trees burst forth with new leaves. The weeping willow tree was a mass of tiny pale green leaves, thousands of them, which whispered and sighed together as the wind moved through its branches. There were fat heads of lettuce in the fields, and cucumbers lying like jewels among them, and enormous red tomatoes surrounded by thick, knotted vines.And for the first time in 1,728 days, the clouds broke apart and there was dazzling blue sky, and light beyond what anyone could remember.The sun had come out at last.”

“Summer explodes into Portland. In early June the heat was there but not the color--the green were still pale and tentative, the morning had a biting coolness--but by the last week of school everything is Technicolor and splash, outrageous blue skies and purple thunderstorms and ink-black night skies and red flowers as brights as spots of blood.”

“El momento de la muerte está lleno de sonido y calidez y luz, tanta luz que me llena, me absorbe: un túnel de destellos de luz, formando un arco hacia arriba y arriba, y si el cantar fuera un sentimiento, sería este, esta luz, esta elevación, como ganas de reír...”

“Supongo que eso es lo que ocurre cuando se dice adiós para siempre, hay que dar un salto al vacío. Lo peor es tomar la decisión de hacerlo. Una vez que se está en el aire, no hay nada que puedas hacer, sólo dejarte ir.”

“Muchas cosas se convierten en preciosas cuando las miras realmente.”

“Supongo que ese es el secreto si alguna vez deseas que las cosas vuelvan a ser como eran. Sólo tienes que mirar hacia arriba.”

“(...) cuán extrañas son las personas. Puedes verlas todos los días, puedes pensar que los conoces, y entonces puedes descubrir que apenas si sabes algo de ellas.”

“I start to back away before I do something wildly inappropriate, like jump on top of him.”

“Esa palabra manda una corriente directo a través de mi. Muerte, tan final, tan desagradable, tan corta.”

“Pero antes de señalarme con el dedo, pregúntate esto: ¿que es lo que hice tan malo? ¿Tan malo para merecerme morir? ¿Tan malo para merecerme morir así? ¿Es realmente mucho peor de lo que hacen los demás? ¿Es realmente mucho peor de lo que haces tú? Piensa en ello.”

“Entonces es cuando sucede. El momento de la muerte está lleno de golpes y sonidos, y del dolor más grande que nada, una chimenea de ardiente calor partiéndome en dos, algo marchitando, quemando y desgarrando, y si el grita fuera un sentimiento, sería este.Después, nada.”

“La mayoría de las veces la noche lleva a otra noche, las semanas a otras semanas y los meses a otros meses. Y tarde o temprano todos moriremos.”

“This is pretty much the answer to every problem you encounter in suburbia: plant a tree, and hope you don't see anyone's privates.”

“Mamá, mamá llévame a casa.Estoy medio muerta y lejos de casa.Me encontré un invalido y me cantó una canción,me mostró su sonrisa y me arrancó el corazón.”

“Every single floorboard quivers and shudders under my feet, and I start mentally bargaining with the house: If I make it to the front door without waking up Aunt Carol, I swear to God I’ll never slam another door. I’ll never call you “an old piece of turd” again.”

“Yeah, but our choices are limited. We choose from a list that they chose for us." She said."Well, Choices are supposed to be limited. That's life" I snapped”

“A sharp blade of sadness goes through me, deep and quick. I guess it was bound to happeneventually. I’ve always known it would. Everyone you trust, everyone you think you can count on, will eventually disappoint you. When left to their own devices, people lie and keep secrets and change and disappear, some behind a different face or personality, some behind a dense early morning fog, beyond a cliff. That’s why the cure is so important. That’s why we need it.”

“I wonder if this is how people always get close: They heal each other's wounds; they repair the broken skin.”

“Julian is somewhere among those lights, in that blur of people and buildings. I wonder whether he's scared. I wonder whether he's thinking of me.”

“Fourth period I have "life skills", which is what they call gym when you're old enough to be offended by forced physical activity (Elody thinks they should call it slavery instead, for accuracy).”

“If you want something, if you take it for your own, you'll always be taking it from someone else.”

“The flip side of freedom is this: When you're completely free, you're also completely on your own.”

“I read once about a kind of fungus that grows in trees. The fungus begins to encroach on the systems that carry water and nutrients up from the roots to the branches. It disables them one by one―it crowds them out. Soon, the fungus―and only the fungus―is carrying the water, and the chemicals, and everything else the tree needs to survive. At the same time it is decaying the tree slowly from within, turning it minute by minute to rot.That is what hatred is. It will feed you and at the same time turn you to rot.It is hard and deep and angular, a system of blockades. It is everything and total.”

“There is nothing else for people to do. They do not think. They feel no passion, no hatred, no sadness; they feel nothing but fear, and a desire to control. So they watch, and poke, and pry.”

“Waste today, want tomorrow...”

“That's the thing: We didn't really care. A world without love is also a world without stakes.”

“Grief is like sinking, like being buried. I am in water the tawny color of kicked-up dirt. Every breath is full of choking. There is nothing to hold on to, no sides, no way to claw myself up. There is nothing to do but let go.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 old things, and days that look like darkness.”

“Most of the time - 99 percent of the time - you just don't know how and why the threads are looped together, and that's okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes. And very, very rarely - by some miracle of chance and coincidence, butterflies beating their wings just so and all the threads hanging together for a minute - you get the chance to do the right thing.”

“Music, I think, he makes me feel like music.”

“Maybe before you die, it's your ghosts you see.”

“For years that's been the buzzword of the house: Sam just wants to be left alone... ...Things change after you die, though -- I guess because dying is about the loneliest thing you can do.”

“The hours here are flat and round, disks of gray layered one on top of the other...they move slowly, at a grind, until it seems as though they are not moving at all. They are just pressing down...”

“Sarah: "Not bad. You look almost human."Lena: "Thanks."Sarah: "I said almost."Lena: "Well, then, almost thanks.”

“What does it feel like to be infected?""I-- I can't describe it." I force the words out. Can't breathe, can't breathe, can't breathe. His skin smells like smoke from a wood fire, like soap, like heaven. I imagine tasting his skin; I imagine biting his lips. "I want to know." His words are a whisper, barely audible. "I want to know with you.”

“The reason you can never go home again isn't necessarily that places change, but people do. So nothing ever looks the same.”

“The tunnels may be long, and twisted, and dark; but you are supposed to go through them.”

“They say that the cure for love will make me happy and safe forever. And I’ve always believed them. Until now. Now everything has changed. Now, I’d rather be infected with love for the tiniest sliver of a second than live a hundred years smothered by a lie”

“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.”

“Nothing has ever been so painful or delicious as being so close to him and being unable to do anything about it: like eating ice cream so fast on a hot day you get a splitting headache.”

“The idea—the fact of it, the fact that he even noticed and thought about me for more than one second—is huge and overwhelming, makes my legs go tingly and my hands feel numb.”

“What is beauty? Beauty is no more than a trick; a delusion; the influence of excited particles and electrons colliding in your eyes, jostling in your brain like a bunch of overeager school children, about to be released on break. Will you let yourself be deluded? Will you let yourself be decieved?-"On Beauty and Falsehood," The New Philosophy, by Ellen Dorpshire”

“Huamns, uregulated, are cruel and capricious; violet and selfish; miserable and quarrelsome. It is only after their instincts and basic emotions have been controlled that they can be happy, generous, and good.”

“Mary bring out your umbrella - The sun shines down on this fine, fine dayBut the ashes raining down foreverAre going to turn your hair to gray.Mary keep your oars a-steadySail away on the rising floodKeep your candle at the readyRed tides can't be told from blood.- "Miss Mary" (a common child's clapping game, dating from the time of the blitz), from Pattycake and Beyond: A History of Play”

“There has been significant debate in the scientific community about whether desire is a symptom of a system infected with amor deliria nervosa, or a pre-condition of the disease itself. It is unanimously agreed, however, that love and desire enjoy a symbiotic relationship, meaning that one cannnot exist without the other. Desire is enemy to ncontentment; desire is illness, a feverish brain. Who can be considereed healthy who wants? The very word want suggests a lack, an impoverishment, and that is what desire is: an impoverishment of the brain, a flaw, a mistake. Fortunately, that can now be corrected.- From The Roots and Repercussions of Amor Deliria Nervosa on Cognitive Functioning, 4th edition, by Dr. Phillip Berryman”