Lauren Oliver Quotes

282 Sourced Quotes

Most people don't want to be saved. Besides, if you keep bailing everybody out, they'll never learn to paddle on their own.

Lauren Oliver
Step on a crack, you'll break your mama's back. Step on a stone, you'll end up all alone. Step on a stick, you're bound to get the Sick. Watch where you tread, you'll bring out all the dead. - A common children's playground chant, usually accompanied by jumping rope or clapping.

Lauren Oliver
Human beings, in their natural state, are unpredictable, erratic, and unhappy. It is only once their animal instincts are controlled that they can be responsible, dependable, and content.

Lauren Oliver
The second time my world exploded, it was also because of a word. A word that worked its way out of my throat and danced onto and out of my lips before I could think about it, or stop it. The question was: Will you meet me tomorrow? And the word was: Yes.

Lauren Oliver
There were days I asked for it-prayed for it when I went to sleep. The belief that I would see you again, that I could find you-the hope for it-was the only thing that kept me going.

Lauren Oliver
If Cassie was invalidated because she caught the disease, or because Fred suspected her of it, I can only imagine what he will do to me and to my family if he discovers that the cure did not work perfectly.

Lauren Oliver
Funny how time heals. Like that bullet in my ribs. It's there, I know it's there, but I can barely feel it at all anymore.

Lauren Oliver
It's an incredible thing, how you can feel so taken care of by someone and yet feel, also, like you would die or do anything just for the chance to protect him back.

Lauren Oliver
And even if she isn't—even if by some miracle, she survived the escape and has been squeezing out a living in the Wilds—she would never join forces with the resisters. She would never be violent or vengeful. Not Lena, who used to practically faint when she pricked a finger, who couldn't even lie to a teacher about being late. She wouldn't have the stomach for it.

Lauren Oliver
People could push and pull at you, and poke you, and probe as deep as they could go. They could even tear you apart, bit by bit. But at the heart and root and soul of you, something would remain untouched.

Lauren Oliver
Welcome to the free world. We give people the power to choose. They can even choose the wrong thing. Beautiful, isn't it?

Lauren Oliver
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.

Lauren Oliver
There is nothing else for people to do. They do not think. They feel no passion, no hatred, no sadness; they feel nothing but fear, and a desire to control. So they watch, and poke, and pry.

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

Lauren Oliver
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.

Lauren Oliver
And once at Hana's house, when we stole some blackberry liqueur from her parents' liquor cabinet and drank until the ceiling started spinning overhead. Hana was laughing and giggling, but I didn't like it, didn't like the sweet sick taste in my mouth or the way my thoughts seemed to break apart like a mist in the sun.

Lauren Oliver
In my head I try and reach back, through the fence, past the smoke; I try and grab his hand and pull. Alex, come back. There is nothing to do but sink. The hours close around me, encase me completely, like a tomb.

Lauren Oliver
I wonder if this is how people always get close: They heal each other's wounds; they repair the broken skin.

Lauren Oliver
He Is looking at me through the smoke, across the fence. He never takes his eyes off me. His hair Is a crown of leaves, of thorns, of flames. 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.

Lauren Oliver
No one had ever told her this basic fact: not everyone got to be loved.

Lauren Oliver
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.

Lauren Oliver
That's what time does: We stand stubbornly like rocks while it flows all around us, believing that we are immutable - and all the time we're being carved, and shaped, and whittled away.

Lauren Oliver
Everything looks beautiful. The Book of Shhh says that deliria alters your perception, disables your ability to reason clearly, impairs you from making sound judgments. But it does not tell you this: that love will turn the whole world into something greater than itself.

Lauren Oliver
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.

Lauren Oliver
The thing is, you don't get to know. It's not like you wake up with a bad feeling in your stomach. You don't see shadows where there shouldn't be any. You don't remember to tell your parents you love them or—in my case—remember to say good-bye to them at all.

Lauren Oliver
That is the strangest thing about the world: how it looks so different from every point of view.

Lauren Oliver
I am now officially married to Fred Hargrove. Nothing will ever be the same.

Lauren Oliver
People are like ants: Just a few of them give all the orders. And most of them spend their lives getting squashed.

Lauren Oliver
The kidnapping, the kiss. I brought him here, after all. I rescue him an pulled him into this new life, a life of freedom and feeling.

Lauren Oliver
The whole point of growing up is learning to stay on the laughing side.

Lauren Oliver