Lauren Oliver Quotes - Page 18

It will kill me, it will kill me, it will kill me. And I don't care.

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.

my wild, uncured, erratic, incomprehensible heart.

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

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

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

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.

This is what amazes me: that people are new every day. That they are never the same. You must always invent them, and they must always invent themselves, too.

With the cure, relationships are all the same, and rules and expectations are defined. Without the cure, relationships must be reinvented every day, languages constantly decoded and deciphered. Freedom is exhausting.

Perfection is a promise, and a reassurance that we are not wrong.

I love you. Remember. And someday, I will find you again.

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.

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.

Life isn't life if you just float through it.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

There's a place for everything and everyone, you know. That is the mistake they make above. They think that only certain people have a place. Only certain kinds of people belong. The rest is waste. But even waste must have a place. Otherwise it will clog and clot, and rot and fester.

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.

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. ... He has tipped us over, all of us in our teetering expectancy, and now we are pouring toward him, coursing on a wave of sound, of roaring shouts and applause. ... They are the moon; we are a tide, their tide, and under their direction we will wipe clean all the sickness and blight from the world.

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

I guess there are some things you never get used to.