Lauren Oliver quotes:

There are times I wish I was more conventional. I would get a husband and a baby and a big SUV in the 'burbs and be happy. But forging my own way - my career, my relationships with wonderful but troubled people - that's who I am.

The devil stole into the Garden of Eden. He carried with him the disease - amor deliria nervosa - in the form of a seed. It grew and flowered into a magnificent apple tree, which bore apples as bright as blood. -From Genesis: A Complete History of the World and the Known Universe, by Steven Horace, PhD, Harvard University

But you can build a future out of anything. A scrap, a flicker. The desire to go forward, slowly, one foot at a time. You can build an airy city out of ruins.

Alex is dead, do you hear me? All of that-what we felt, what it meant- that's done now, okay? Buried. Blown away.

And a face above mine, white and beautiful, eyes as large as the moon. You saved me. A hand on my cheek, cool and dry. Why did you save me? Words welling up on a tide: No, the opposite. Eyes the colour of a dawn sky, a crown of blond hair, so bright and white and blinding I could swear it was a halo.

Dystopian novels help people process their fears about what the future might look like; further, they usually show that there is always hope, even in the bleakest future.

You don't reach points in life at which everything is sorted out for us. I believe in endings that should suggest our stories always continue.

Finishing books - and leaving the world you've created - is always a kind of emotionally wrenching experience. I usually cry.

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

I'd rather die on my own terms than live on theirs. I'd rather die loving Alex than live without him.

I know what the problem is, of course. The disorientation, the distraction, the difficulty focusing - all classic Phase One signs of deliria. But I don't care. If pneumonia felt this good I'd stand out in the snow in the winter with bare feet and no coat, or march into the hospital and kiss pneumonia patients

In one of the tents, Julian is sleeping. And in another: Alex

I will make a pact with you: I will do it if you will do it, always and forever. Take down the walls.

And you should hear the music. Incredible, amazing music, like nothing you've ever heard, music that almost takes your head off, you know? That makes you want to scream and jump up and down and break stuff and cry...

Amor deliria nervosa. The deadliest of all deadly things.

One of the things I've tried to do in my career is really write different kinds of books, so I'm able to broaden people's expectations of what I'm allowed to do.

Coincidences; mix-ups; harmless mistakes and switches. And so a story is born.

Is it possible to tell the truth in a society of lies? Or must you always, of necessity, become a liar?And if you lie to a liar, is the sun somehow negated or reversed?"

I often write two books simultaneously. Usually one of them starts out as a fun experiment designed to give me a daily break from the real book I'm writing. And then that becomes a real book too.

I feel a lot of adult fiction looks down on plot as a lesser form of literature.

Power isn't free. Energy isn't free. It has to be earned.

I've never really thought about it before, but it's a miracle how many kinds of light there are in the world, how many skies: the pale brightness of spring, when it feels like the hole world's blushing; the lush, bright boldness of a July noon; purple storm skies and a green queasiness just before lightning strikes and crazy multicolored sunsets that look like someone's acid trip.

I remember Lena's expression when he knocked on the door; and how Alex had looked at her when she finally let him into the storeroom. I remember exactly what he was wearing, too, and the mess of his hair, the sneakers with their blue-tinged laces. His right shoe was untied. He didn't notice. He didn't notice anything but Lena.

And how she looked at me like I could save her from everything bad in he world. This was my secret: she was the one who saved me

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?

All of you, wherever you are: in your spiny cities, or your one-bump towns. Find it, the hard stuff, the links 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.

I worked in publishing before I became an author, so I knew how a book gets made.

Lord, help us root our feet to the earthAnd our eyes to the roadAnd always remember the fallen angelsWho, attempting to soar,Were seared instead by the sun and, wings melting,Came crashing back to the sea.Lord, help root my eyes to the earthAnd stay my eyes to the roadSo I may never stumble.-Psalm 24 (From Prayer and Study, The Book of Shhh)

But it's not about knowing. It is simply about going forward.

I often write two books simultaneously. Usually one of them starts out as a fun experiment designed to give me a daily break from the real book I'm writing. And then that becomes a real book too."

Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge. That's what it is: an edge; a razor. It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away on either side.

It's funny, isn't it? When you are young you just want to be old, and then later you wish you could go back to being a kid.

i think of all the thousands of billions of steps and missteps and chances and coincidences that have brought me here. Brought you here, and it feels like the biggest miracle in the world.

Hope keeps you alive.

How is it possible, I think, to change so much and not be able to change anything at all?

I guess that's what saying good-bye is always like--like jumping off an edge. The worst part is making the choice to do it. Once you're in the air, there's nothing you can do but let go.

This is what happens when you try to help people. You get screwed.

If singing were a feeling it would be this, this light, this lifting, like laughing...

It's not my fault I can't be like you, okay? I don't get up in the morning thinking the world is one big, shiny, happy place, okay? That's just not how I work. I don't think I can be fixed.

I used to think that's what love was: knowing someone so well he was like a part of you.

Be honest: Are you surprised that I didn't realize sooner? Are you surprised that it took me so long to even /think/ the word -- death? Dying? Dead? Do you think I was being stupid? Naive? Try not to judge. Remember that we're the same, you and me. I thought I would live forever too.

When we get out of highschool we'll look back and know we did everything right, that we kissed the cutest boys and went to the best parties, got in just enough trouble, listened to our music too loud, smoked too many cigarettes, and drank too much and laughed too much and listened too little, or not al all.

This 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. Hatred is a high tower. In the Wilds, I start to build, and to climb.

And this, really, is the story-within-the-story, because if you do not believe that hearts can bloom suddenly bigger, and that love can open like a flower out of even the hardest places, then I am afraid that for you the world will be long and brown and barren, and you will have trouble finding the light. But if you do believe, then you already know all about magic.

My heart shoots into my throat every time I think I see his loping walk, or catch sight of some floppy brown hair on a boy - but it's never him, and each time it isn't, my heart does a reverse trajectory down into the very pit of my stomach.

people themselves are full of tunnels: winding, dark spaces and caverns; impossible to know all the places inside of them. Impossible even to imagine.

No guy in his right mind would ever choose me when there are people like Hana in the world: It would be like settling for a stale cookie when what you really want is a big bowl of ice cream, whipped cream and cherries and chocolate sprinkles included.

It was as though the darkness was a sheet of raw cookie dough and someone had just taken a cookie cutter and made a child-sized shape out of it.

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.

Things That Don't Matter When You've Lived the Same Day Six Times and Died on at Least Two of Them: Lunch meats and their relative coolness.

So are you going to be my knight in shining armor or what?' Kent does a little bow. 'You know I can't resist a damsel in distress.

I said, I prefer the ocean when it's gray. Or not really gray. A pale, in-between color. It reminds me of waiting for something good to happen.

Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge.

Sometimes I feel like if you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you - sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever.

He is my world and my world is him and without him there is no world.

It will kill me, it will kill me, it will kill me. And I don't care.

Is this freedom? Is it happiness? I don't know. I don't care anymore. It is different--it is being alive.

Droplets, droplets: we are all identical drips and drops of people, hovering, waiting to be tipped, waiting for someone to show us the way, to pour us down a path.

My heart is drumming in my chest so hard it aches, but it's the good kind of ache, like the feeling you get on the first real day of autumn, when the air is crisp and the leaves are all flaring at the edges and the wind smells just vaguely of smoke - like the end and the beginning of something all at once.

There's that confidence again, that semi-infuriating easiness of his, the tilt of his head and the smile. but today it's not infuriating. Today I like it, feel like it's somehow rubbing off on me, like if I was around him enough I would never feel awkward or frightened or insecure.

I get that rush that comes when you know you're doing something wrong and are getting away with it, like stealing from the school cafeteria of getting tipsy at a family holiday without anyone knowing it.

No wonder the regulators decided on segregation of boys and girls: Otherwise, it would have been a nightmare, this feeling angry and self-conscious and confused and annoyed all the time.

The first time I saw you, at the Governor, I handn't been to watch the birds at the border in years. But that's what you reminded me of. You were jumping up, and you were yelling something, and your hair was coming loose from your ponytail, and you were so fast..." He shakes his head. "Just a flash, and then you were gone, Exactly like a bird.

Snapshots, moments, mere seconds: as fragile and beautiful and hopeless as a single butterfly, flapping on against a gathering wind.

It was a bird. A bird struggling through stickiness: a bird coated in paint, floundering in its nest, splashing color everywhere. Red. Red. Red. Dozens of them: black feathers coated thickly with crimson-colored paint, fluttering among the branches. Red means run.

I wish I could close my eyes and be blown into dust and nothingness, feel all my thoughts disperse like dandelion fluff drifting off on the wind. But his hands keep pulling me back: into the alley, and Portland, and a world that has suddenly stopped making sense.

Everything in me feels fluttering and free, like I could take off from the ground at any second. Music, I think, he makes me feel like music.

Hearts are fragile things. That's why you have to be so careful.

What glitters may not be gold; and even wolves may smile; and fools will be led by promises to their deaths.

Music, I think, he makes me feel like music

Once Mo had closed the gates, he returned to his little stone hut, and his half-eaten sandwich of butter and canned sardines, and his mug of thick hot chocolate, which every night he poured carefully into a thermos labeled COFFEE.

I don't love you, Lena. Do you hear me? I never love you.

I need him to know that I came for him. I need him to know that somehow, at some point in the tunnels, I began to love him.

Please understand. Please forgive me. I prayed every day for you to be alive, until hope became painful. Don't hate me. I still love you.

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.

Popularity's a weird thing. You can't really define it, and it's not cool to talk about, but you know it when you see it. Like a lazy eye, or porn.

I'd rather die my way than live yours.

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.

Most of us won't see one another after graduation, and even if we do it will be different. We'll be different. We'll be adults--cured, tagged and labeled and paired and identified and placed neatly on our life path, perfectly round marbles set to roll down even, well-defined slopes.

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).

Live free or die.

Maybe next time, but probably not.

One of the strangest things about life is that it will chug on, blind and oblivious, even as your private world - your little carved-out sphere - is twisting and morphing, even breaking apart.

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.

My first kiss. A new kind of kiss, like the new kind of music still playing, softly, in the distance - wild and arrhythmic, desperate. Passionate.

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

As we're standing there I realize we're almost exactly the same height. We must look like the dark and light side of an Oreo cookie, and I think how just as easily it could have been the other way around. She could be blocking my path; I could be trying to slip around her into the dark.

Lindsay calls them the Pugs: pretty from far away, ugly up close.

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.

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

Requiem has been controversial because people dont feel I gave it closure.

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

I think of the quietness of Julian's voice as he said I love you, the steadiness of his rib cage rising and falling against my back, as we sleep.I love you, Julian. But the words don't come.

Maybe you can afford to wait. Maybe for you there's a tomorrow. Maybe for you there's one thousand tomorrows, or three thousand, or ten, so much time you can bathe in it, roll around it, let it slide like coins through you fingers. So much time you can waste it.But for some of us there's only today. And the truth is, you never really know.

It's so strange how life works: You want something and you wait and wait and feel like it's taking forever to come. Then it happens and it's over and all you want to do is curl back up in that moment before things changed.

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

I think 'Voldemort' is definitely the scariest villain.

Take down the walls.

There is only what you want and what happens. There is only grabbing on and holding tight in the darkness.

But for now, the future, like the past, means nothing.

on the day that started it all, that rocketed me forward and landed me here, in this new body, in this new future.

It's a miracle I was able to get out of the house today. It's a miracle I'm even wearing pants, a double miracle I remembered to wear shoes.

They are like to plants that have grown around each other- they strangle and squeeze and support at the same time.

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.

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. Freedom is exhausting.

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.

I love to sleep. I'm an excellent, excellent sleeper.

She had never seen snow before, except in TV shows and movies. It had looked to her like the stars were flaking out of the sky. It had looked like thousands of fireflies in the moonlight; like breathlessness, like time stopping, like the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

Strains of music spring up, crystallizing in the night air like rain turning suddenly to snow, drifting to earth.

Everything else is nothing.

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 told you," he whispers back. I can feel his breath just tickling the space behind my ear, making my hair prick up on my neck. "I like you.""You don't know me," I say quickly."I want to, though.

Lies are just stories, and stories are all that matter. We all tell stories. Some are more truthful than others, maybe, but in the end the only thing that counts is what you can make people believe.

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.

And you can't love, not fully, unless you are loved in return.

Is it possible to tell the truth in a society of lies? Or must you always, of necessity, become a liar?And if you lie to a liar, is the sun somehow negated or reversed?

This is what we are made for: promises, pledges, and sworn oaths of obedience.

Find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.

I love you. Remember. They cannot take it

We wanted the freedom to love. We wanted the freedom to choose. Now we have to fight for it.