Lauren Oliver
42 quotes
Biography
Lauren Oliver is an American author of numerous young adult novels including Panic; the Delirium trilogy: Delirium, Pandemonium, and Requiem; and Before I Fall, which became a major motion picture in 2017. Panic was also turned into a series by Amazon studios.
"I love you. Remember. They cannot take it"
"You can't be happy unless you're unhappy sometimes"."
"Maybe you can afford to wait. Maybe for you there's a tomorrow. Maybe for you there's one thousand tomorrows, or three thousand, or ten, so much time you can bathe in it, roll around it, let it slide like coins through you fingers. So much time you can waste it.But for some of us there's only today. And the truth is, you never really know."
"So many things become beautiful when you really look."
"I'd rather die my way than live yours."
"I guess that’s just part of loving people: You have to give things up. Sometimes you even have to give them up."
"I guess that's what saying good-bye is always like--like jumping off an edge. The worst part is making the choice to do it. Once you're in the air, there's nothing you can do but let go."
"Love: It will kill you and save you, both"
"It's so strange how life works: You want something and you wait and wait and feel like it's taking forever to come. Then it happens and it's over and all you want to do is curl back up in that moment before things changed."
"Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge. That's what it is: an edge; a razor. It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away on either side."
"I know that the whole point—the only point—is tofind the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse tolet them go."
"And now I know why they invented words for love, why they had to: It's the only thing that can come close to describing what I feel in that moment, the baffling mixture of pain and pleasure and fear and joy, all running sharply through me at once."
"I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa"
"And you can't love, not fully, unless you are loved in return."
"He is my world and my world is him and without him there is no world."
"Now I'd rather be infected with love for the tiniest sliver of a second than live a hundred years smothered by a lie."
"If you’re smart, you care. And if you care, you love."
"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."
"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."
"Who knows? Maybe they’re right. Maybe we are driven crazy by our feelings. Maybe love is a disease, and we would be better off without it. But we have chosen a different road. And in the end that is the point of escaping the cure: We are free to choose.We are even free to choose the wrong thing."
"Popularity's a weird thing. You can't really define it, and it's not cool to talk about, but you know it when you see it. Like a lazy eye, or porn."
"I'd rather die on my own terms than live on theirs. I'd rather die loving Alex than live without him."
"Are you sure that being like everybody else will make you happy?""I don't know any other way.""Let me show you."And then we're kissing. Or at least, I think we're kissing—I've only seen it done a couple of times, quick closed-mouth pecks at weddings or on formal occasions. 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."
"We wanted the freedom to love. We wanted the freedom to choose. Now we have to fight for it."
"Find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go."