Quotes by Lauren Oliver

Sometimes day and night reverse. Sometimes up goes down and down goes up, and love turns into hate, and the things you counted on get washed out from under your feet, leaving you pedaling in the air. Sometimes people stop loving you. And thats the kind of darkness that never gets fixed, no matter how many moons rise again, filling the sky with a weak approximation of light.

Because I think youre right. You can make a difference. He told me experiences were kind of like fate, and fate usually came in the form of a test. He told me fate liked to be worshiped. It liked to see us fall on out knees before it offered to help us up... ♥

Is what I did really so bad? So bad I deserve to die? So bad I deserved to die like that?I what I did really so much worse than waht anybody else does?Is it really so much worse than what you do?Think about it.

You broke my heart.I fell for you and you broke my heart.Period, done, end of story.

Lies are just stories, and stories are all that matter. We all tell stories. Some are more truthful than others, maybe, but in the end the only thing that counts is what you can make people believe.

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

Because 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.

Dont you get it? You cant tell me what to feel.

Running is a mental sport, more than anything else. Youre only as good as your training, and your training is only as good as your thinking.

Not gray, exactly. Right before the sun rises theres a moment when the whole sky goes this pale nothing color-not really gray but sort of, or sort of white, and Ive always really liked it because it reminds me of waiting for something good to happen.

I keep having the urge to cross my hands over my chest, to cover up my breasts, to hide. Im 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 hes looking at me thinking im wrong or deformed. But the he breathes, Beautiful and when his eyes meet mine I know that he really, truly means it.

See?” my mother would say, smiling at me and my sister, Carol, in turn. “We live in the greatest country on earth. See how lucky we are?”And yet the ash continued swirling down, and the smells of death came through the windows, crept under the door, hung in our carpets and curtains, and screamed of her lie.Is it possible to tell the truth in a society of lies? Or must you always, of necessity, become a liar?And if you lie to a liar, is the sin somehow negated or reversed?These are the kinds of questions I ask myself now: in these dark, watery hours, when night and day are interchangeable. No. Not true.

Its the rule of the wilds. You must be bigger, and stronger, and tougher. A coldness radiates through me, a solid wall that is growing, piece by piece, in my chest. He doesnt love me.He never loved me.It was all a lie.The old Lena is dead. I say, and then push past him. Each step is more difficult than the last; the heaviness fills me and turns my limbs to stone.You must hurt or be hurt.

Everyone is asleep. Theyve all been asleep for years. You seemed ... awake. Alex is whispering now. He closes his eyes, opens them again.Im tired of sleeping.

Please understand. Please forgive me.I prayed every day for you to be alive, until hope became painful.Dont hate me.I still love you.

Up and down, up and down, a ladder of choices leading to the next choice, and the next, until suddenly youve run out of choices, and ladder, and you find time as rare and thin as air on a mountain. Then its oops, sorry, turns over.

He believed in people. He believed that if people could only be shown the right way-the way to health and order, a way to be free of unhappiness-they would make the right choice. They would obey.

This was progress. This was modernity: you could cover over the past completely. You could bury the old under a relentless surface of new, stretched from corner to corner.

Love will turn the whole world into something greater than itself.

That is the rule of the Wilds: You must be bigger and stronger and tougher. You must hurt or be hurt.