Quotes by Lauren Oliver

Its not my fault I cant be like you, okay? I dont get up in the morning thinking the world is one big, shiny, happy place, okay? Thats just not how I work. I dont think I can be fixed.

And now I realize Lindsays not fearless. Shes terrified. Shes terrified that people will find out shes faking, bullshitting her way through life, pretending to have everything together when really shes just floundering like the rest of us. Lindsay, who will bite at you if you even look in her direction the wrong way, like on of those tiny attack dogs that are always barking and snapping in the air before theyre jerked backward on the chains that keep them in one place.

Hana? Lena says softly. Are you okay?That single stupid question breaks me. All the metal fingers relax me at once, and the tears theyve been holding back come surging up at once. Suddenly I am sobbing and telling her everything: about the raid, and the dogs, and the sounds of skulls cracking underneath regulators nightsticks. Thinking about it again makes me feel like I might puke. At a certain point, Lena puts her arms around me and starts murmuring things into my hair. I dont even know what shes saying, and I dont care. JUst having her here—solid, real, on my side—makes me feel better than I have in weeks. Slowly I manage to stop crying, swallowing back the hiccups and sobs that are still running through me. I try to tell her that Ive missed her, and that Ive been stupid and wrong, but my voice is muffled and thick

You’re angry at me,” she says.I stop crying at once. My whole body goes cold and still. She squats down beside me, and even though I’m careful not to look up, not to look at her at all, I can feel her, can smell the sweat from her skin and hear the ragged pattern of her breathing.“You’re angry at me,” she repeats, and her voice hitches a little. “You think I don’t care.”Her voice is the same. For years I used to imagine that voice lilting over those forbidden words: I love you. Remember. They cannot take it. Her last words to me before she went away.She shuffles forward and squats next to me. She hesitates, then reaches out and places her palm against my cheek, and turns my head toward hers so I’m forced to look at her. I can feel the calluses on her fingers.In her eyes, I see myself reflected in miniature, and I tunnel back to a time before she left, before I believed she was gone forever, when her eyes welcomed me into every day and shepherded me, every night, into sleep.“You turned out even more beautiful than I’d imagined,” she whispers. She, too, is crying.The hard casement inside me breaks.“Why?” is the only word that comes. Without intending to or even thinking about it, I allow her to draw me against her chest, let her wrap her arms around me. I cry into the space between her collarbones, inhaling the still-familiar smell of her skin.There are so many things I need to ask her: What happened to you in the Crypts? How could you let them take you away? Where did you go? But all I can say is: “Why didn’t you come for me? After all those years—all that time—why didn’t you come?” Then I can’t speak at all; my sobs become shudders.“Shhh.” She presses her lips to my forehead, strokes my hair, just like she used to when I was a child. I am a baby once again in her arms—helpless and needy. “I’m here now.”She rubs my back while I cry. Slowly, I feel the darkness drain out of me, as though pulled away by the motion of her hand. Finally I can breathe again. My eyes are burning, and my throat feels raw and sore. I draw away from her, wiping my eyes with the heel of my hand, not even caring that my nose is running. I’m suddenly exhausted—too tired to be hurt, too tired to be angry. I want to sleep, and sleep.“I never stopped thinking about you,” my mother says. “I thought of you every day—you and Rachel.

...into hate, into refusal, against hope and without fear

Is what I did really so much worse than what anybody else does?Is it really so much worse than what you do?Think about it.

My boyfriends an idiot, I say as soon as he lurches

Why do you flirt with Mr. Daimler? Hes a perv, you

I tear down Baxter, which loops around the last mile down to Back Cove.And then I stop short. The buildings have fallen away behind me, giving way to ramshackle sheds, sparsely situated on either side of the cracked and run-down road. Beyond that, a short strip of tall, weedy grass slants down toward the cove.The water is an enormous mirror, tipped with pink and gold from the sky. In that single, blazing moment as I come around the bend, the sun—curved over the dip of the horizon like a solid gold archway—lets out its final winking rays of light, shattering the darkness of the water, turning everything white for a fraction of a second, and then falls away, sinking, dragging the pink and the red and the purple out of the sky with it, all the color bleeding away instantly and leaving only dark.Alex was right. It was gorgeous—one of the best I’ve ever seen.

I think of Lindsay in the bathroom of Rosalita’s, and wonder how many people are clutching secrets like little fists, like rocks sitting in the pits of their stomachs. All of them, maybe.

She always imagined their voices entangled somewhere in the wires when they spoke, caught up in a grid she didnt fully understand, passing back and forth. Once the calls were disconnected, she imagined the echoes of old conversations would be trapped there, floating back and forth with no exit, like ghosts.

Id never undetstood how Hana Could lie so often and easily. But just like anyhting else, lying becomes easier the more you do it.

But maybe you carried your demons with you everywhere, the way you carried your shadow.

Id rather die my way than live yours.

When youre completely free, youre also completely on your own.

Theres still always the possibility that Ive gone totally, clinically cuckoo. But somehow I dont think so anymore.An article I once read said that crazy people dont worry about being crazy - thats the whole problem.

They told us love was a disease. They told us it would kill us in the end.For the very first time I realize, that this, too, might also be a lie.

But I am terrified by what I want: for him, and worst of all, from him. Because I do want. Im not even sure what, exactly, but the want is there, just like the hate and anger were there before. But this is not a tower. It is an endless, tunneling pit; it drives deep, and opens a hole inside me.

The DFA and organizations like it have pushed and squeezed and elbowed out all the feeling in the world. They have clamped their fists around a geyser to keep it from exploding.But the pressure eventually builds, and the explosion will always come.

I thought if I followed the rules, things would turn out all right. thats the thing about the cure, isnt it? It isnt just about deliria at all. Its about order. A path for everyone. You just have to follow it and everything will be okay. Thats what the DFA is about. Thats what I belevied in-what Ive had to believe in. Because otherwise, its just...chaos.