Lauren Oliver
It's like high school holds two different worlds, revolving around each other an never touching; the haves and the have-nots. I guess it's a good thing. High school is supposed to prepare you for the real world, after all.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Summer
I’ve been trying so hard not to think his name, not to even breathe the idea of himCollection: Thinking
Both of us will die today, gunned down or smashed up or exploded in some terrible moment of fire and twisted metal, and when they go to bury us we'll be so melted together and entwined they won't be able to separate the bodies; pieces of him will go with me, and pieces of me will go with him.Collection: Fire
Everything looks stark and vivid and frozen, as though drawn precisely and outlined in ink - parents' smiles frozen, camera flashes blinding, mouths open and white teeth glinstening, dark glossy hair and deep blue sky and unrelenting light, everyone drowning in light - everything so clear and perfect I'm sure it must already be a memory, or a dream.Collection: Dream
I want to know." His words are a whisper, barely audible. "I want to know with you.Collection: Want
Perhaps this was how the sparrows did it too; perhaps they were looking so hard at the peaks and tips of the new rooftops coated with dew, and the vast new horizon, that they only forgot that they did not know how to fly until they were already in midair.Collection: New Horizons
Something aches at the very core of me, something ancient and deep and stronger than words: the filament that joins each of us to the root of existence, that ancient thing unfurling and resisting and grappling, desperately, for a foothold, a way to stay here, breathe, keep going.Collection: Roots
Most things, even the greatest movements on earth, have their beginnings in something small. An earthquake that shatters a city might begin with a tremble, a breath. Music begins with a vibration . . . And God created the whole universe from an atom no bigger than a thought.Collection: Earthquakes
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.Collection: Tunnels
And there it is: Even though we’re standing in the same patch of sun-drenched pavement, we might as well be a hundred thousand miles apart.Collection: Might
This is the world we live in, a world of safety and happiness and order, a world without love. A world where children crack their heads on stone fireplaces and nearly gnaw off their tongues and the parents are concerned. Not heartbroken, frantic, desperate. Concerned, as they are when you fail mathematics, as they are when they are late to pay their taxes.Collection: Heartbroken
If he were less well trained, and less careful, he would say hate. But he can’t say it; it is too close to passion, and passion is too close to love, and love is amor deliria nervosa, the deadliest of all deadly things: It is the reason for the games of pretend, for the secret selves, for the spasms in the throat.Collection: Hate
Something must die so that others can live.Collection: Dies
We can never understand. We can only try, fumbling our way through the tunneled places, reaching for light.Collection: Light
But...books are so much more. Some of them are webs; you can feel your way along their threads, but just barely, into strange and dark corners. Some of them are balloons bobbing up through the sky: totally self-contained, and unreachable, but beautiful to watch. And some of them―the best ones―are doors.Collection: Beautiful
willing me to understand: that people should be sacrificed to causes, that beauty can be built on the backs of the dead.Collection: People
And I have Julian. I found him, and he followed me. I reach out in the half dark, wordlessly, and find his hands. We interlace our fingers, and though he doesn't say anything either, I can feel the warmth and energy passing between us, a soundless dialogue. Thank you, he is saying, and I am saying, I am so happy, I am so happy, I needed you to be safe.Collection: Dark
Sometimes I'm afraid to go to sleep because of what I'm leaving behind.Collection: Sleep
An eye for an eye." "And the whole world goes blind," Coral puts in quietly.Collection: Eye
There are some losses we never get over.Collection: Loss
That's the thing about best friends. That's what they do. They keep you from spinning off the edge.Collection: Spinning
Hate isn’t the most dangerous thing, he’d said. Indifference is.Collection: Hate
How can someone have the power to shatter you to dust--and also to make you feel so whole?Collection: Dust
And in that moment, the wordless thing passed between us, the thing that wasn't quite love but was so close I could believe in it sometimes.Collection: Believe
And now I know why they invented words for love, why they had to: It's the only thing that can come close to describing what I feel in that moment, the baffling mixture of pain and pleasure and fear and joy, all running sharply through me at once.Collection: Running
This was what true fear was--that you could never know other people, not completely. That you were always just guessing blind.Collection: People
Welcome to the free world. We give people the power to choose. They can even choose the wrong thing. Beautiful, isn't it?Collection: Beautiful
There are no happy endings, only breaks in the regular action.Collection: Action
There's always some relief in giving up.Collection: Giving Up
Everyone just wasting time because they have so much of it to waste, minutes slipping by on who's with who and did you hear.Collection: Waste
We are all punished for the lives we have chosen, in one way or another.Collection: Way
But maybe you carried your demons with you everywhere, the way you carried your shadow.Collection: Shadow
Through wind, and tempest, storm, and rain; The calm shall be buried inside of me; A warm stone, heavy and dry; The root, the source, a weapon against painCollection: Pain
Most people don't want to be saved. Besides, if you keep bailing everybody out, they'll never learn to paddle on their own.Collection: People
I know the past will drag you backward and down, have you snatching at whispers of wind and the gibberish of trees rubbing together, trying to decipher some code, trying to piece together what was broken. It's hopeless. The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside you like a stone.Collection: Past
Things would get difficult again. But that was okay too. The bravery was in moving forward, no matter what.Collection: Moving
I'm used to a feeling of doubleness, of thinking one thing and having to do another, a constant tug-of-war.Collection: War
Amor deliria nervosa. The deadliest of all deadly things.Collection: Amor
It's like a razor blade edging its way through my organs, shredding me, all I can think is: It will kill me, it will kill me, it will kill me. And I don't care.Collection: Thinking
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 UniversityCollection: Garden
Even the greatest movements on earth, have their beginnings with something small.Collection: Movement
It's Connecticut: being like the people around you is the whole point.Collection: People
I'm starved for different light, a different sun,different sky.Collection: Light
But that's the beauty of life: time is yours to keep and to change. Just a few minutes can be sufficient to carve a new road, a new track. Just a few minutes, and the void is kept at bay. You will live forever with that new road inside of you, stretching away to a place suggested, barely, on the horizon. For the shortest time, shorter than the shortest second's breath, you get to stand up to infinity. But eventually, and always, infinity wins.Collection: Life
So far I've seen the life studies packet used as (1) an umbrella, (2) a makeshift towel, (3) a pillow, and now this. I have never actually seen anyone study with it, which either means that everyone who graduates from Thomas Jefferson will be totally unprepared for life or that certain things can't be learned in bullet-point format.Collection: Mean
A room full of words that are nearly the truth but not quite, each note fluttering off the steam of its rose like a broken butterfly wing.Collection: Butterfly
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.Collection: Two
like I am Alice in the Wonderland and have gotten too big for the room.Collection: Wonderland