Lauren Oliver, Requiem
23 quotes
"They couldn’t have known that even this was a lie—that we never really choose, not entirely. We are always being pushed and squeezed down one road or another. We have no choice but to step forward, and then step forward again, and then step forward again; suddenly we find ourselves on a road we haven’t chosen at all.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."
"Power isn't free. Energy isn't free. It has to be earned."
"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."
"I don't understand how everything changes, how the layers of your life get buried. Impossible. At some point, at some time, we must all explode."
"An eye for an eye." "And the whole world goes blind," Coral puts in quietly."
"I think of the quietness of Julian’s voice as he said I love you, the steadiness of his rib cage rising and falling against my back, as we sleep.I love you, Julian. But the words don’t come."
"That is the rule of the Wilds: You must be bigger and stronger and tougher. You must hurt or be hurt."
"I start to follow her, and Alex grabs my hand."I'll find you," he says, watching me with the eyes I remember. "I won't let you go again."I don't trust myself to speak. Instead I nod, hoping that he understands me. He squeezes my hand."Go," he says."
"For a second, I feel a sense of overwhelming grief: for how things change, for the fact that we can never go back. I'm not certain of anything anymore. I don't know what will happen--"
"This is the past: It drifts, it gathers. If you are not careful, it will bury you."
"This is the past: It drifts, it gathers. If you are not careful, it will bury you. This is half the reason for the cure: It clean-sweeps; it makes the past, and all its pain, distant, like the barest impression on sparkling glass.But the cure works differently for everybody; and it does not work perfectly for all."
"Because I think you're 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..." ♥"
"Please understand. Please forgive me.I prayed every day for you to be alive, until hope became painful.Don't hate me.I still love you."
"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."
"Take down the walls."
"This is not the person I wanted to become: Hatred has carved a permanent place inside me, a hollow where things are so easily lost."
"He is no longer mine to lose, but the grief is there, a gnawing sense of disbelief."
"We are all punished for the lives we have chosen, in one way or another."
"You do not know what will happen if you take down the walls; you cannot see through to the other side, don't know whether it will bring freedom or ruin, resolution or chaos. It might be paradise or destruction. Take down the walls. Otherwise you must live closely, in fear, building barricades against the unknown, saying prayers against the darkness, speaking verse of terror and tightness. Otherwise you may never know hell, but you will not find heaven, either."
"People are stubborn and stupid. They're irrational. they're destructive. that's the point, isn't it? That's the whole reason for the cure. People will no longer destroy their own lives. They won't be capable of it."
"She lives for this-the fight, the battle for survival. She actually enjoys it."
"Perfection is a promise, and a reassurance that we are not wrong."
"I put my forehead on his collarbone, place one hand on his chest. Its rhythm reassures me: He is real, and he is now."