Lauren Oliver
I was a troubled teen and I was constantly looking for someone to throw me a rope. Those ropes are connections. They allow us to see that life exists beyond the little worlds we are currently a part of.Collection: Teen
I think dystopian futures are also a reflection of current fears.
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.
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 think I'm able to do so much because writing is what I love to do. So, often when I have free time, I choose to write and edit.
I love to sleep. I'm an excellent, excellent sleeper.
I worked in publishing before I became an author, so I knew how a book gets made.
I have a beautiful pair of Giuseppe Zanotti black pumps that make me feel like a model every time I put them on. I have a pair of Jimmy Choo flats I would marry, if I could.
With 'Delirium,' I had to spend time thinking about the political, social and religious structure of a different world. But it was a fun challenge.
I think 'Voldemort' is definitely the scariest villain.
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.
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.
I feel a lot of adult fiction looks down on plot as a lesser form of literature.
'Requiem' has been controversial because people don't feel I gave it closure.
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.
My parents were pretty liberal, but they were still parents. I definitely had my teenage rebellion.
I think all artists are only interested in a couple of themes, really. I'm primarily interested in change and connection as being this restorative force. I write about them because that's what I think about in my own life.
Finishing books - and leaving the world you've created - is always a kind of emotionally wrenching experience. I usually cry.
I try to write characters that are as real, emotionally and psychologically, as I can make them; I feel the same way about setting. This often means that I'm drawing from my experiences and observations.
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.Collection: Kids
Hearts are fragile things. That's why you have to be so careful.Collection: Heart
I guess that’s just part of loving people: You have to give things up. Sometimes you even have to give them up.Collection: Love
Hope keeps you alive.Collection: Alive
It amazes me how easy it is for things to change, how easy it is to start off down the same road you always take and wind up somewhere new. Just one false step, one pause, one detour, and you end up with new friends or a bad reputation or a boyfriend or a breakup. It's never occurred to me before; I've never been able to see it. And it makes me feel, weirdly, like maybe all of these different possibilities exist at the same time, like each moment we live has a thousand other moments layered underneath it that look different.Collection: Change
And when it started to get dark you pointed to the sky, and told me there was a star for every thing you loved about me.Collection: Stars
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.Collection: Thinking
I'd rather die my way than live yours.Collection: Strong
I know that the whole point—the only point—is to find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.Collection: Fighting
We are always being pushed and squeezed down one road or another. We have no choice but to step forward, and then step forward again, and then step forward again; suddenly we find ourselves on a road we haven't chosen at all.Collection: Choices
The flip side of freedom is this: When you're completely free, you're also completely on your own.Collection: Flip
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.Collection: Life
How is it possible, I think, to change so much and not be able to change anything at all?Collection: Thinking
A good friend keeps your secrets for you. A best friend helps you keep your own secrets.Collection: Good Friend
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.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Want Something
I'd rather die on my own terms than live on theirs. I'd rather die loving Alex than live without him.Collection: Alex
I don't know whether these feelings - this thing growing inside of me - is something horrible and sick or the best thing that's ever happened to me. Either way, I can't stop it. I've lost control. And the truly sick thing is that despite everything, I'm glad.Collection: Sick
You have to go forward: It's the only way. You have to go forward no matter what happens. This is the universal law.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Letting Go
Who knows? Maybe they’re right. Maybe we are driven crazy by our feelings. Maybe love is a disease, and we would be better off without it. But we have chosen a different road. And in the end that is the point of escaping the cure: We are free to choose. We are even free to choose the wrong thing.Collection: Crazy
You can't be happy unless you're unhappy sometimes".Collection: Happiness
If you cross a line and nothing happens, the line loses meaning.Collection: Lines
He who leaps for the sky may fall, it's true. But he may also fly.Collection: Fall
When you love someone, when you care for someone, you have to do it through the good and the bad. Not just when you're happy and it's easy.Collection: When You Love Someone
"And I love you too." His fingers skate the edge of my jaw, dance briefly over my lips. "You should know that. You have to know that."Collection: Love You
Two weeks until your cure" she says finally. "Sixteen days" I say, but in my head I'm counting: Seven days. Seven days until I'm free and away from all these people and their sliding superficial lives brushing past one another gliding, gliding, gliding from life to death. For them there's hardly a change between the two.Collection: Past
I hate both of my parents right now: for sitting quietly in our house, while out in the darkness my heart was beating away all of the seconds of my life, ticking them off one by one until my time was up; for letting the thread between us stretch so far and so thin that the moment it was severed for good they didn't even feel it.Collection: Hate
For the first time in a long time, I actually look at her. I've always thought Lena was pretty, but now it occurs to me that at some point - last summer? last year? - she became beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
They’d already taken her from me once. I didn’t want to lose her again.Collection: Taken
Nobody ever said life was fair.Collection: Said Life