Lauren Oliver - Delirium (2011)

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Hearts are fragile things. That's why you have to be so careful.

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
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.

Lauren Oliver
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.

Lauren Oliver
Two weeks until your cure" she says finally. "Sixteen days" I say, but in my head I'm counting: Seven days. Seven days until I'm free and away from all these people and their sliding superficial lives brushing past one another gliding, gliding, gliding from life to death. For them there's hardly a change between the two.

Lauren Oliver
We can never understand. We can only try, fumbling our way through the tunneled places, reaching for light.

Lauren Oliver
There are no happy endings, only breaks in the regular action.

Lauren Oliver
I screamed until my voice dried up in my throat. We all did. All of us in Ward Six, all of us forgotten, left to rot.

Lauren Oliver
But maybe happiness isn't in the choosing. Maybe it's in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.

Lauren Oliver
My former people were not totally wrong. Love is a kind of possession. It's a poison. And if Alex no longer loves me, I can't bear to think that he might love somebody else.

Lauren Oliver
Anger is useful only to a certain point. After that, it becomes rage, and rage will make you careless.

Lauren Oliver
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.

Lauren Oliver
Let me tell you something about dying: it's not as bad as they says. it's the coming-back-to-life part that hurts.

Lauren Oliver
For a second I think about how easy it would be to pass back to the other side, to walk straight into the laboratories and offer myself up to the surgeons. You were right; I was wrong. Get it out.

Lauren Oliver
The most dangerous sicknesses are those that make us believe we are well.

Lauren Oliver
We wanted the freedom to love. We wanted the freedom to choose. Now we have to fight for it.

Lauren Oliver
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.

Lauren Oliver
For a moment, my heart aches for him. I should never have asked him to join me here; I should never have asked him to cross.

Lauren Oliver
Quiet through the grave go I; or else beneath the graves I lie

Lauren Oliver
Take it from me: If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging up your back and runing its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do-the only thing-is run.

Lauren Oliver
Unhappiness is bondage; therefore, happiness is freedom. The way to find happiness is through the cure. Therefore, it is only through the cure that one finds freedom.

Lauren Oliver
But that's the problem with love - it acts on you, works through you, resists your attempts to control.

Lauren Oliver
Of all the systems of the body - neurological, cognitive, special, sensory - the cardiological system is the most sensitive and easily disturbed. The role of society must be to shelter these systems from infection and decay, or else the future of the human race is at stake. Like a summer fruit that is protected from insect invasion, bruising, and rot by the whole mechanism of modern farming; so must we protect the heart.

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
But now I give in, let the anger surge. I'm sick of people acting like this world, this other world is the normal one, while I'm the freak. It's not fair; like all the rules have suddenly changed and somebody forgot to tell me.

Lauren Oliver
I've been trying so hard not to think his name, not to even breathe the idea of him

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
No guy in his right mind would ever choose me when there are people like Hana in the world: It would be like settling for a stale cookie when what you really want is a big bowl of ice cream, whipped cream and cherries and chocolate sprinkles included.

Lauren Oliver
Please understand. Please forgive me. I prayed every day for you to be alive, until hope became painful. Don't hate me. I still love you.

Lauren Oliver
This is the past: It drifts, it gathers. If you are not careful, it will bury you.

Lauren Oliver