Lauren Oliver
But that's the problem with love - it acts on you, works through you, resists your attempts to control.Collection: Problem
We wanted the freedom to love. We wanted the freedom to choose. Now we have to fight for it.Collection: Fighting
And you can't love, not fully, unless you are loved in return.Collection: Return
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.Collection: Hurt
The walls are covered -crammed- with writing. No. Not writing. They are covered with a single four-letter word that has been inscribed over and over, on every available surface. Love.Collection: Wall
We'll walk together holding hands, and kiss in broad daylight, and love each other as much as we want to, and no one will ever try to keep up apart.Collection: Kissing
Po swirled upward from where it had been sitting, and floated over to the window. "When you go swimming and you put your head under the water," Po said, "and everything is strange and underwater-sounding, and strange and underwater-looking, you don't miss the air do you? You don't miss the above-water sounds and the above-water look. It's just different." "True." Liesl was quiet for a moment. Then she added, "But I bet you'd miss it if you were drowning. I bet you'd really miss the air then."Collection: Swimming
My stomach gets that hollowed-out feeling. It's amazing how words can do that, just shred your insides apart.Collection: Feelings
There are more of us than you think.Collection: Thinking
..in that moment i realize how much i love the little everyday routines of my life..the details that are my life's special pattern, like how in handwoven rugs what really makes them unique are the tiny flaws in the stitching, little gaps and jumps and stutters that can never be reproduced. so many things become beautiful when you really look.Collection: Beautiful
it's weird how much people change. for example, when i was a kid i loved all of these things..and over time all of them just fell away, one after another, replaced by friends and IMing and cell phones and boys and clothes. 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.Collection: Kids
They haven't killed us yet," I say, and I imagine that one day I will fly a plane over Portland, over Rochester, over every fenced-in city in the whole country, and I will bomb and bomb and bomb, and watch all their buildings smoldering to dust, and all those people melting and bleeding into flame, and I will see how they like it. If you take, we will take back. Steal from us, and we will rob you blind. When you squeeze, we will hit. This is the way the world is made now.Collection: Country
Alex loved books. He was the one who first introduced me to poetry. That's another reason I can't read anymore.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Hands
Additionally, Liesl and Po is the embodiment of what writing has always been for me at its purest and most basic--not a paycheck, certainly; not an idea, even; and not an escape. Actually, it is the opposite of an escape; it is a way back in, a way to enter and make sense of a world that occasionally seems harsh and terrible and mystifying. (From the "Author's Note" at the end).Collection: Writing
I thought the Invalids were beasts; I thought they would rip me apart. But these people saved me, and gave me the softest place to sleep, and nursed me back to health, and haven't asked for anything in return. The animals are on the other side of the fence: monsters wearing uniforms. They speak softly, and tell lies, and smile as they're slitting your throat.Collection: Rip
Raven has lost deeply, again and again, and she, too, has buried herself. There are pieces of her scattered all over. Her heart is nestled next to a small set of bones buried beside a frozen river, which will emerge with the spring thaw, a skeleton ship rising out of the water”.Collection: Spring
An itchy feeling began to work its way through my body, as though a thousand mosquitoes were circulating through my blood, biting me from the inside, making me want to scream, jump, squirm. I ran.Collection: Blood
The only thing worse than having no friends is being pitied for having no friends.Collection: No Friends
I guess there are some things you never get used to.Collection: Used
Funny how certain things stay with you.Collection: Certain
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.Collection: Valentines Day
The tunnels may be long, and twisted, and dark; but you are supposed to go through them.Collection: Dark
The reason you can never go home again isn't necessarily that places change, but people do. So nothing ever looks the same.Collection: Home
It's like there's a filter set up in my brain, except instead of making things better, it twists everything around so what comes out of my mouth is totally wrong, totally different from what I was thinking.Collection: Thinking
The priests and the scientists are right about one thing: At our heart, at our base, we are no better than animals.Collection: Heart
Here's something else you might as well learn now: If you want something, if you take it for your own, you'll always be taking it from someone else. That's a rule too. And something must die so that others can live.Collection: Want Something
There's a place for everything and everyone, you know. That is the mistake they make above. They think that only certain people have a place. Only certain kinds of people belong. The rest is waste. But even waste must have a place. Otherwise it will clog and clot, and rot and fester.Collection: Mistake
If you want something, if you take it for your own, you'll always be taking it from someone else.Collection: Want Something
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.Collection: Moving
Sarah: "Not bad. You look almost human." Lena: "Thanks." Sarah: "I said almost." Lena: "Well, then, almost thanks.Collection: Looks
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.Collection: Smell
As soon as I look up, his eyes click onto my face. The breath whooshes out of my body and everything freezes for a second, as though I’m looking at him through my camera lens, zoomed in all the way, the world pausing for that tiny span of time between the opening and closing of the shutter.Collection: Eye
All this time, I thought we were growing apart because I was leaving Lena behind. But really it was the reverse. She was learning to lie. She was learning to love.Collection: Lying
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. ... He has tipped us over, all of us in our teetering expectancy, and now we are pouring toward him, coursing on a wave of sound, of roaring shouts and applause. ... They are the moon; we are a tide, their tide, and under their direction we will wipe clean all the sickness and blight from the world.Collection: Moon
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.Collection: Stupid
This is the first day of my new beginning. From now on I’m going to do things right. I’m going to be a different person, a good person. I’m going to be the kind of person who would be remembered well, not just remembered.Collection: Firsts
We all need mantras, I guess – stories we tell ourselves to keep us going.Collection: Stories
For the first time in my life I’ve done something for me and by choice and not because somebody told me it was good or bad.Collection: Firsts
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.Collection: Stories
Alex loved books. He was the one who first introduced me to poetry. That’s another reason I can’t read anymore.Collection: Firsts
This is what I want. This is the only thing I’ve ever wanted. Everything else – every single second of every single day that has come before this very moment, this kiss – has meant nothing.Collection: Romance
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.Collection: Romance