Lauren Oliver - Delirium (2011)

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No one can tell us no. No one can make us stop. We have picked each other and the rest of the world can go to hell.

Lauren Oliver
Most of us won't see one another after graduation, and even if we do it will be different. We'll be different. We'll be adults--cured, tagged and labeled and paired and identified and placed neatly on our life path, perfectly round marbles set to roll down even, well-defined slopes.

Lauren Oliver
I think of the quietness of Julian's voice as he said I love you, the steadiness of his rib cage rising and falling against my back, as we sleep.I love you, Julian. But the words don't come.

Lauren Oliver
I thought if I followed the rules, things would turn out all right. that's the thing about the cure, isn't it? It isn't just about deliria at all. It's about order. A path for everyone. You just have to follow it and everything will be okay. That's what the DFA is about. That's what I belevied in-what I've had to believe in. Because otherwise, it's just...chaos.

Lauren Oliver
There is only what you want and what happens. There is only grabbing on and holding tight in the darkness.

Lauren Oliver
This is not the person I wanted to become: Hatred has carved a permanent place inside me, a hollow where things are so easily lost.

Lauren Oliver
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 University

Lauren Oliver
I've learned to get really good at this - say one thing when I'm thinking about something else, act like I'm listening when I'm not, pretend to be calm and happy when I'm really freaking out. It's one of the skills you perfect as you get older

Lauren Oliver
It was a bird. A bird struggling through stickiness: a bird coated in paint, floundering in its nest, splashing color everywhere. Red. Red. Red. Dozens of them: black feathers coated thickly with crimson-colored paint, fluttering among the branches. Red means run.

Lauren Oliver
Love and desire enjoy a symbiotic relationship, meaning that one cannot exist without the other. Desire is an enemy to contentment; desire is illness, a feverish brain. Who can be considered healthy who wants? The very word want suggests a lack, an impoverishment, and that is what desire is: an impoverishment of the brain, a flaw, a mistake.

Lauren Oliver
I'm overwhelmed with sadness for everything that was lost, and filled with anger toward the people who took it away. My people-or at least, my old people. I don't know who I am anymore, or where I belong. That's not totally true...I know I belong with Alex.

Lauren Oliver
We're on the other side of the fence now, Lena,' she says, tiredly, as she passes. "Don't you get it? You can't tell me what to feel.

Lauren Oliver
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.

Lauren Oliver
This is the strange way of the world, that people who simply want to love are instead forced to become warriors.

Lauren Oliver
That's when you really lose people, you know.When the pain passes.

Lauren Oliver
And you should hear the music. Incredible, amazing music, like nothing you've ever heard, music that almost takes your head off, you know? That makes you want to scream and jump up and down and break stuff and cry...

Lauren Oliver
And you can't love, not fully, unless you are loved in return.

Lauren Oliver
I'd rather die on my own terms than live on theirs. I'd rather die loving Alex than live without him.

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
It won't matter if nobody ever thinks I'm pretty (although sometimes I wish, just for a second, that somebody would)

Lauren Oliver
This is what we are made for: promises, pledges, and sworn oaths of obedience.

Lauren Oliver
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.

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
It's as though the words are trapped, buried under past fears, past lives, like fossils compressed under layers of dirt.

Lauren Oliver
I feel a flash of grief so intense it almost makes me cry out: not for what I lost, but for the chances I missed.

Lauren Oliver
What glitters may not be gold; and even wolves may smile; and fools will be led by promises to their deaths.

Lauren Oliver
I remember Lena's expression when he knocked on the door; and how Alex had looked at her when she finally let him into the storeroom. I remember exactly what he was wearing, too, and the mess of his hair, the sneakers with their blue-tinged laces. His right shoe was untied. He didn't notice. He didn't notice anything but Lena.

Lauren Oliver
For a second I feel a rush of sadness: for the horizons that vanish behind us, for the people we leave behind, the tiny-doll selves that get stored away and ultimately buried.

Lauren Oliver
Like I've been sketched by an amateur artist: if you don't look too closely, it's all right, but start focusing and all the smudges and mistakes become really obvious.

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