Lauren Oliver - Time Quotes

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Mary bring out your umbrella - The sun shines down on this fine, fine day But the ashes raining down forever Are going to turn your hair to gray. Mary keep your oars a-steady Sail away on the rising flood Keep your candle at the ready Red tides can't be told from blood. - "Miss Mary" (a common child's clapping game, dating from the time of the blitz), from Pattycake and Beyond: A History of Play

Lauren Oliver
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.

Lauren Oliver
It was unfair that people could pretend to be one thing when they were really something else. That they would get you on their side and then do nothing but fail, and fail, and fail again. People should come with warnings, like cigarette packs: involvement would kill you over time.

Lauren Oliver
Sometimes I feel as though there are two me's, one coasting directly on top of the other: the superficial me, who nods when she's supposed to nod and says what she's supposed to say, and some other, deeper part, the part that worries and dreams... Most of the time they move along in sync and I hardly notice the split, but sometimes it feels as though I'm two whole different people and I could rip apart at any second.

Lauren Oliver
Despite the fact that Raven and Tack are often fighting, it's impossible to imagine one without the other. They are like two plants that have grown around each other - they strangle and squeeze and support at the same time.

Lauren Oliver
Are you sure that being like everybody else will make you happy?" "I don't know any other way." "Let me show you." And then we're kissing. Or at least, I think we're kissing—I've only seen it done a couple of times, quick closed-mouth pecks at weddings or on formal occasions. But this isn't like anything I've ever seen, or imagined, or even dreamed: this is like music or dancing but better than both.

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
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
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
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.

Lauren Oliver
They've lied about everything.-about the fence, and the existence of Invalids, about a million other things besides. They told us the raids were carried out for our own protection. They told us the regulators were only interested in keeping the peace. 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, maight also be a lie.

Lauren Oliver
Most of the time one night blends into the next and weeks blend into weeks and months into other months. And sooner or later we all die. But at the beginning of the night anything's possible.

Lauren Oliver
It's the time of the night I like best, when most people are asleep and it feels like the world belongs completely to my friends and me, as though nothing exists apart from out little circle: everywhere else is darkness and quiet.

Lauren Oliver
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.

Lauren Oliver
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.

Lauren Oliver
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.

Lauren Oliver
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.

Lauren Oliver
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.

Lauren Oliver
It's amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast.

Lauren Oliver
I didn't realize then what a privilege that was: to be bored with your best friend; to have time to waste.

Lauren Oliver
I don't understand how everything changes, how the layers of your life get buried. Impossible. At some point, at some time, we must all explode.

Lauren Oliver
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.

Lauren Oliver
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.

Lauren Oliver
It occurs to me that for a long time she has been doing her own version of resisting.

Lauren Oliver
Of all the miracles Po had seen in the time and space of its death, Po thought this—the absorption of another, the carrying of it—was the most bewildering and remarkable of all. Whenever Bundle separated again, Po was left with an ache of sadness that reminded the ghost of the body it had left behind.

Lauren Oliver
That's my favorite thing about him. I like to lie next to him when it's late, dark, and so quiet I can hear my own heartbeat. It's times like that when I'm sure that I'm in love.

Lauren Oliver
Time becomes a stutter-the space between drumbeats, splintered into fragments, and also endlessly long, as long as soaring guitar notes that melt into one another, as full as the dark mass of bodies around me. I feel like the air downstairs has gone to liquid, to sweat and smell and sound, and I have broken apart in it. I am wave: I am pulled into the everything. I am energy and noise and a heartbeat going boom, boom, boom, echoing the drums.

Lauren Oliver
I cry for everything I abandoned and because I, too, have been left behind — by Alex, by my mom, by time that has cut through our worlds and separated us.

Lauren Oliver
Time jumps. It leaps. It pours away like water through fingers.

Lauren Oliver