Lauren Oliver - Pandemonium (2012)

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If you take, we will take back. Steal from us, and we will rob you blind. When you squeeze, we will hit. This is the way the world is made now.

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

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

Lauren Oliver

Now, after so many years, I understand what the Coldness was and where it came from—this sense that everything is lost, and worthless, and meaningless.

Lauren Oliver

Live free or die. Four words. Thirteen letters. Ridges, bumps, swirls under my fingertips. Another story. We cling tightly to it, and our belief turns it to truth.

Lauren Oliver

An eye for an eye." "And the whole world goes blind," Coral puts in quietly.

Lauren Oliver

The walls are covered -crammed- with writing. No. Not writing. They are covered with a single four-letter word that has been inscribed over and over, on every available surface. Love.

Lauren Oliver

In a world without love, this is what people are to each other: values, benefits, and liabilities, numbers and data. We weigh, we quantify, we measure, and the soul is ground to dust.

Lauren Oliver

The only thing worse than having no friends is being pitied for having no friends.

Lauren Oliver

This is the world we live in, a world of safety and happiness and order, a world without love. A world where children crack their heads on stone fireplaces and nearly gnaw off their tongues and the parents are concerned. Not heartbroken, frantic, desperate. Concerned, as they are when you fail mathematics, as they are when they are late to pay their taxes.

Lauren Oliver

Here's something else you might as well learn now: If you want something, if you take it for your own, you'll always be taking it from someone else. That's a rule too. And something must die so that others can live.

Lauren Oliver

We all need mantras, I guess - stories we tell ourselves to keep us going.

Lauren Oliver

I am growing stronger. I am a stone being excavated by the slow passage of water; I am wood charred by a fire.

Lauren Oliver

When he speaks again, I can tell that he's smiling. "So I guess we saved each other.

Lauren Oliver

It is a beautiful world for the people who get to play the fist.

Lauren Oliver

And I have Julian. I found him, and he followed me. I reach out in the half dark, wordlessly, and find his hands. We interlace our fingers, and though he doesn't say anything either, I can feel the warmth and energy passing between us, a soundless dialogue. Thank you, he is saying, and I am saying, I am so happy, I am so happy, I needed you to be safe.

Lauren Oliver

The tunnels may be long, and twisted, and dark; but you are supposed to go through them.

Lauren Oliver

Alex loved books. He was the one who first introduced me to poetry. That's another reason I can't read anymore.

Lauren Oliver

There is so much fragility in kissing, in other people: It is all glass.

Lauren Oliver

The flip side of freedom is this: When you're completely free, you're also completely on your own.

Lauren Oliver

But for now, the future, like the past, means nothing. For now, there is only a homestead built of trash and scraps, at the edge of a broken city, just beyond a towering city dump; and our arrival-hungry, and half-frozen, to a place of food and water and walls that keep out the brutal winds. This, for us, is heaven.

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

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

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

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