Lauren DeStefano quotes:

Most dystopian, classic and contemporary, paints a future world that puts a twist on present society - a future world that could plausibly happen.

When I was 11 or 12, I was really bored with everything on my summer reading list. It was all happy, middle-grade kinds of books. I was getting frustrated, because I liked to read. My mother went to the library and got me a copy of 'The Other Side of Midnight' by Sidney Sheldon. It was my first adult book.

Words like 'unputdownable' and 'irresistible' are simply not enough for Cat Winters's In the Shadow of Blackbirds. Days after finishing this story, it remains the first thought I have in the morning, and the thing that haunts me until I sleep.

Her mind is a bird that's trapped inside her skull, flapping and thrashing, never breaking free.

I want to have my questions. I want to have more thoughts than my mind can hold.

Every generation has a macabre notion that wars, government prohibition, natural disasters or mankind itself could be the downfall of society and the world as a whole.

It was my fifth grade teacher who introduced the idea that writing could be more than a hobby for me.

Eventually I realize that I am holding on to him just as tightly as he holds on to me. And here we are: two small dying things, as the world ends around us like falling autumn leaves.

Maybe it is desperation. Maybe we can't let things fall apart without trying. We can't let go of the people we love.

When I am writing anything in general, I just want to tell the story that exists in my head; I don't try to write a parable or make a point.

Do you know what my father used to say?" I ask her. "He used to say that songs had a heart. A crescendo that can make all your blood rush from your head to your toes.

Fall has always been my favorite season. The time when everything bursts with its last beauty, as if nature had been saving up all year for the grand finale.

It's best to let her go," he says. No, no, that's wrong. It's never right to give up on someone.

Vaughn is talking about the heat, and his voice is so excited that it breaks into whispers at times. He loves his madness the way a bird loves the sky.

Dystopian, by definition, promises a darker story.

I've loved you since the day I stole the atlas for you," Gabriel says, because he thinks I'm asleep.

We didn't make ourselves," she says. "We aren't the greatest things to exist. I can't believe that. I won't believe that. We have too many faults.

When I was growing up, there actually wasn't a lot of YA literature as it exists today. Most of the YA that I read was from the '60s and '70s, older than me.

I realized how wonderful YA is and how I really wanted to write something that created that level of intrigue.

Time was our very first king. We all live our lives to the aggressive ticking of the clock. We don't question that our lives are a grid of seconds; even our pulses oblige. No succeeding king can hope to hold this kind of power.

There's a hazy smile on her lips that won't go away, and her hair is a mess. It's like a brushfire filled with casualties.

Childhood is a long, long road, from which that dark whispering forest of death seems an impossible destination.

We writers are resilient souls.

We're all born an empty page.

I think humans have always been desperate. I think it has always been about doing something awful if it might help, when the only other option is death. Maybe that's what being a parent is supposed to feel like.

A girl should never stop thinking.

There is no darkness like that of a confined space.

I am charming. I am fearless.

I am intrigued. I am fearless.

I start trying to stay unconscious. The problem with this is that no amount of willpower can change the reality.

The only characters I ever don't like are ones that leave no impression on me. And I don't write characters that leave no impression on me.

They're making me go to school," Pram said. "I don't think it's a very good idea. I've read about how cruel kids can be.""Are you afraid they'll be cruel, or that being around them for too long will make you cruel?" Felix said."Both, I suppose.

Love unrequited is violent. He loves you so much that he's turned it into hate.

It is the face of a girl who has seen the world, who realizes that it hates her, and who hates it in return.

This is the real Madame. I can see why she hides herself in accents and gems and exotic perfumes. I can see why she's grown to hate anything to do with love. She isn't evil or corrupt the way that Vaughn is. She's broken. Only broken.

A strange thing, words. Once they're said, it's hard to imagine they're untrue.

Because even if the lie is beautiful, the truth is what you face in the end.

Jenna, standing in the doorway with her mouth and hand full of shelled pistachios, says, '"Real' is a dirty word in this place'.

The clouds took on the shape of dancers; from somewhere far off, Pram heard music before the clouds became normal again.

Trust is the strongest weapon.

We can change so many times in our lives. We're born into a family, and it's the only life we can imagine, but it changes. Buildings collapse. Fires burn. And the next second we're someplace else entirely, going through different motions and trying to keep up with this new person we've become.

She's been conned, ruined, left for dead, and she's not going to forgive any of it. She will soldier on, if only out of spite.

Good night, sweetheart," he says. "Good bye, sweetheart," I say. And it's so casual, so innocent that he doesn't suspect a thing.

I watch the ashes swim around like dandelion puffs, making swirls where bodies and walls once stood.

He gathers me up and I'm weightless before he sets me on the railing. He's the only thing keeping me from falling back, out of the reach of daylight. I'm not afraid of falling. I don't fear the sky beyond the train tracks like I did before. I can go anywhere just so long as it's with him.

They never exhale, the trees; on a very windy day, they rustle and inhale, and then the leaves and the branches all tremble as though something means to strangle the life from them. The sky watches on. The world is filled with anticipation, as if to wonder if this day will be a great day, or a horrible day, or the last day.

A feeling can't kill you.

A party in the orange grove. The pain on Linden's face is immediate. I am unwavering. He has cost me more pain than I will ever be able to repay.

Ah, love. Thatâ??s what the world has lost. Thereâ??s no more love, only the illusion of it.

And everywhere girls, tumbling from trees like orange blossoms and hitting the earth with sickening thuds. They crack open.

And if I have to die trying, I will get out of here.

and I've always known it, the way I love a song I hear for the first time, even before I know all the words, the way I love my favorite color, and the way that the train would speed past my bedroom when it was very quiet and I'd feel it in my stomach rushing through me. I love you in a way that I've never felt needed to be said.

And then I wonder, does my brother think of me this way? We entered this world together, one after the other, beats in a pulse. But I will be first to leave it. That's what I've been promised. When we were children, did he dare to imagine an empty space beside him where I then stood giggling, blowing soap bubbles through my fingers? When I die, will he be sorry that he loved me? Sorry that we were twins? Maybe he already is.

Bet you never eat, he says. Bet you drink up the oxygen like it's butter. Bet you can go for days on nothing but thoughts.

But I know all the things you're too sweet to know.

But instead of tears, when I press my face against the pillow, a horrible, primal scream comes out of me. It's unlike anything I thought myself capable of. Rage, unlike anything I've ever known.

Cure" is one of the most precious words in the English language. It's a short word. A clean and simple word. But it isn't so easy a thing as it sounds. There are questions like: How will this affect us in ten years? In twenty? What will it do to our children? Our children's children?

Did you tell freedom hello for me?

Don't you miss it?" I say. "Being free." He laughs.

Even the human race can't claim to be natural anymore. We are fake, dying things. How fitting that I would end up in this sham of a marriage.

Even things that aren't broken can be fixed.

Every star has been set in the sky. We mistakenly think they were put there for us.

Everyone should remember being born. It doesn't seem fair that we only remember dying.

Fate,' I said, 'Is a theif.

Fate, I think, is a thief.

For males twenty-five is the fatal age. For women it's twenty. We are all dropping like flies.

Forget who you are and what you think is there, and you'll discover things that don't exist to be known.

Gabriel's voice can reach me anywhere. Even in a hurricane.

Give me time" "For you, always.

He kissed back, all the pages spread out around us like riddles waiting to be solved. Let them wait. Let my genes unravel, my hinges come loose. If my fate rests in the hands of a madman, let death come and bring its worse. I'll take the ruined craters of laboratories, the dead trees, this city with ashes in the oxygen, if it means freedom. I'd sooner die here than live a hundred years with wires in my veins.

He says one word, nodding into the daylight. "Look." It's an astounding word. It's a gift.

He sits next to me, careful to avoid my hair that's splayed out around my head like blood. A bullet to the forehead, boom, blond waves everywhere.

His three wives are huddled together on the bare mattress, one of them dying; when we're together, we form an alliance he can't touch. He's scared to even try.

Home?' I say. It's a word that can mean anywhere and nowhere.

Hope, that risky, illustrious thing. It should have gone extinct by now, but we keep it alive.

Humans are the absolute worst thing to happen to this planet.

I always knew I was an excellent liar; I just didn't know that I had it in me to fool myself.

I can hear my brother's voice in my head. Your problem is that you're too emotional. But how can I not be emotional, Rowan? How can I not care?

I don't dare touch her. Loss is a knowledge I'm sorry to have. Perhaps the only thing worse than experiencing it, is watching it replay anew in someone else--all the awful stages picking up like a chorus that has to be sung.

I don't know if it was love or an illusion. I don't know if there's ever a way to be certain.

I figured it out eventually," she says. She's sitting on the edge of the gurney again; her features slowly materialize as my vision clears. "It's momentum." "What?" I whisper. The feeling returning to my lips, spreading out to my fingertips and toes. "Momentum," she repeats. "You can't just stand there if you want something to fly. You have to run.

I had this feeling like the solution to everything would be down there if only I could dig through all those clouds.

I like the idea of something greater than us. We destroy things with our curiosity. We shatter with our best intentions. We are no closer to perfection than we were one hundred years ago, or five hundred.

I liked just being with you. I liked the way you breathed when you were asleep. I liked when you took the champagne glass from my hand. I liked how your fingers were always too long for your gloves.

I lost everyone I loved," I tell him. I wait for him to look at me, and then I add, "The day I met you.

I miss something I never even had.

I never wanted to live forever," she says. "I just wanted enough time.

I nod like I'm not at all unnerved by this new cold side to him. Not cruel like his father. Not warm like the husband who sought me out on quiet nights. Something in between. This Linden has never woven his fingers through mine, never chosen me from a line of weary Gathered girls, never said he loved me in a myriad of coloured lights. We are nothing to each other.

I shake my head, watching snow tumble and swirl from an all-white sky. The world seems so clean if you only look up

I should not have loved my daughter as I did. Not in this world in which nothing lives for long. You children are flies. You are roses. You multiply and die.

I stare at her collarbone that's framed with lace, the hollow of her throat, her shoulders that rise with each rise with the weight of her next breath. We're fragile things. Our bones show through our skin. What would any god want with us?

I think he's beginning to understand, and understanding is a horrible thing.

I think she's brave. I think that nobody has ever believed what she could be capable of. All her life, nobody was listening.

I think, in this strange world of beautiful things, there may be some humanity after all.

I used to have only one name; it used to mean something.

I want to make a world more magical than my own. I don't care if it makes sense, I don't care if it's ridiculed or if, rather than a neat round planet that goes around forever, it ends with a cliff that falls off into nothing. I want to have my eyes wide open, and I want to see this room and at the same time, not this room.

I want to make the world into something better so that he can be okay.

I wanted so badly to tell him, but something about that entire night seemed so beautiful, so bizarre, that I didn't trust it with my secrets.

I wanted to be rid of him," he says. He raises my chin with his thumb. "But not if it meant being rid of you. I climbed in beside you, and you put your head in my lap. You can't think I would have left you like that." "Look what it got you," I say. "Tea in bed and you here in front of me," he says. "It was a terrible decision, and I confess I'd make it again.

I was born into a world that was already dying; I belong to it.

I wish I had a memory of that first violent shove, the shock of cold air, the sting of oxygen into new lungs. Everyone should remember being born. It doesn't seem fair that we only remember dying.

I wonder if she has figured out that I'll never love Linden, especially not in the way she does, and that he'll never love anyone the way he loves her. I wonder if she realizes, despite all her efforts to train me, that I can never take her place.

I'll tell you something about true love. There's no science to it. It's as natural as the sky.

I'm suddenly finding it hard to know the difference between nightmares and consciousness.

In another time, in another place, I wonder who they might have been.

In the distance I see a lighthouse. The light washes over us and continues on its rotation. This time, I don't know where the light will guide us.

It doesn't matter how much his mother loves him; love is not enough to keep any of us alive.

It taught that there are three versions of things: the one I see in my mind, and the one that carries onto the paper, and then what it ultimately becomes.

It was a terrible decision, and I confess I'd make it again.

It's never right to give up on someone.

It's quiet for a while, and then Rowan says; "We could talk now. We're alone out here. No walls." "There are always walls." I say.

It's the silence I imagine in the rest of the world, the silence of an endless ocean and uninhabitable island, a silence that can be seen from space.

I've done it all before, I tell myself, and I can do it again. Trust is the strongest weapon.