Lauren Oliver - Pandemonium (2012)

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I said, I prefer the ocean when it's gray. Or not really gray. A pale, in-between color. It reminds me of waiting for something good to happen.

Lauren Oliver
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.

Lauren Oliver
Everything I see and touch reminds me of him, and so everything I see and touch is perfect.

Lauren Oliver
He who leaps for the sky may fall, it's true. But he may also fly.

Lauren Oliver
Old words; words that nearly brought me to my knees. Live free or die

Lauren Oliver
The priests and the scientists are right about one thing: At our heart, at our base, we are no better than animals.

Lauren Oliver
Raven has lost deeply, again and again, and she, too, has buried herself. There are pieces of her scattered all over. Her heart is nestled next to a small set of bones buried beside a frozen river, which will emerge with the spring thaw, a skeleton ship rising out of the water.

Lauren Oliver
Droplets, droplets: we are all identical drips and drops of people, hovering, waiting to be tipped, waiting for someone to show us the way, to pour us down a path.

Lauren Oliver
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.

Lauren Oliver
Promise me we'll stay together, okay? His eyes are once again the clear blue of a perfectly transparent pool. They are eyes to swim in, to float in, forever. "You and me". "I promise". I say. behind us the door creaks open, and I turn around, expecting Raven, just as a voice cuts through the air: "Don't believe her.

Lauren Oliver
I keep having the urge to cross my hands over my chest, to cover up my breasts, to hide. I'm suddenly aware of how pale I look in the sunshine, and how many moles I have spotting up and down my chest, and I just know he's looking at me thinking i'm wrong or deformed. But the he breathes, 'Beautiful' and when his eyes meet mine I know that he really, truly means it.

Lauren Oliver
Willing me to understand: that people should be sacrificed to causes, that beauty can be built on the backs of the dead.

Lauren Oliver
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 pain

Lauren Oliver
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.

Lauren Oliver
Rainstorms are incredible: falling shards of glass, the air full of diamonds.

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

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
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
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
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
I have had to give up so much, so many selves and lives already. I have grown up and out of the rubble of my old lives, of things and people I have cared for....

Lauren Oliver
I want to know." His words are a whisper, barely audible. "I want to know with you.

Lauren Oliver