Lauren Oliver > Quotes

“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.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“I love you. Remember. They cannot take it”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“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.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“You can't be happy unless you're unhappy sometimes".”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“So many things become beautiful when you really look.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“I guess that’s just part of loving people: You have to give things up. Sometimes you even have to give them up.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“I'd rather die my way than live yours.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“Love: It will kill you and save you, both”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“I run for I don't know how long. Hours, maybe, or days. Alex told me to run. So I run. You have to understand. I am no one special. I am just a single girl. I am five feet two inches tall and I am in-between in every way. But I have a secret. You can build walls all the way to the sky and I will find a way to fly above them. You can try to pin me down with a hundred thousand arms, but I will find a way to resist. And there are many of us out there, more than you think. People who refuse to stop believing. People who refuse to come to earth. People who love in a world without walls, people who love into hate, into refusal, against hope,and without fear. I love you. Remember. They cannot take it.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“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.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“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.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“It's funny, isn't it? When you are young you just want to be old, and then later you wish you could go back to being a kid.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“Hate isn’t the most dangerous thing, he’d said. Indifference is.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“It amazes me how easy it is for things to change, how easy it is to start off down the same road you always take and wind up somewhere new. Just one false step, one pause, one detour, and you end up with new friends or a bad reputation or a boyfriend or a breakup. It's never occurred to me before; I've never been able to see it. And it makes me feel, weirdly, like maybe all of these different possibilities exist at the same time, like each moment we live has a thousand other moments layered underneath it that look different.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“A good friend keeps your secrets for you. A best friend helps you keep your own secrets.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“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.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“Here's one of the things I learned that morning: if you cross a line and nothing happens, the line loses meaning. It's like that old riddle about a tree falling in a forest, and whether it makes a sound if there's no one around to hear it.

You keep drawing a line farther and farther away, crossing it every time. That's how people end up stepping off the edge of the earth. You'd be surprised at how easy it is to bust out of orbit, to spin out to a place where no one can touch you. To lose yourself--to get lost.

Or maybe you wouldn't be surprised. Maybe some of you already know.

To those people, I can only say: I'm sorry.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“He who leaps for the sky may fall, it's true. But he may also fly.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“Sometimes I'm afraid to go to sleep because of what I'm leaving behind.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“Mama, Mama, help me get home
I'm out in the woods, I am out on my own.
I found me a werewolf, a nasty old mutt
It showed me its teeth and went straight for my gut.

Mama, Mama, help me get home
I'm out in the woods, I am out on my own.
I was stopped by a vampire, a rotting old wreck
It showed me its teeth and went straight for my neck.

Mama, Mama, put me to bed
I won't make it home, I'm already half-dead.
I met an Invalid, and fell for his art
He showed me his smile, and went straight for my heart.

-From "A Child's Walk Home," Nursery Rhymes and Folk Tales”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“The whole point of growing up is learning to stay on the laughing side.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“I know that the whole point—the only point—is to
find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to
let them go.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“Here's another thing to remember: hope keeps you alive. Even when you're dead, it's the only thing that keeps you alive.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“My heart is drumming in my chest so hard it aches, but it's the good kind of ache, like the feeling you get on the first real day of autumn, when the air is crisp and the leaves are all flaring at the edges and the wind smells just vaguely of smoke - like the end and the beginning of something all at once.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“How is it possible, I think, to change so much and not be able to change anything at all?”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“I vowed after that day that I would be your hero too, no matter how long it took”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“The deadliest of all deadly things: It kills you both when you have it and
when you don’t.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“It's amazing how words can do that, just shred your insides apart. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me - such bullshit.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“Hearts are fragile things. That's why you have to be so careful.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“Sometimes I feel like if you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you-sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“I used to think that's what love was: knowing someone so well he was like a part of you.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“The most dangerous sicknesses are those that make us believe we are well
- Proverb 42, The Book of Shhh”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“The last laugh, the last cup of coffee, the last sunset, the last time you jump through a sprinkler, or eat an ice-cream cone, or stick your tongue out to catch a snowflake. You just don't know.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“I said, I prefer the ocean when it's gray. Or not really gray. A pale, in-between color. It reminds me of waiting for something good to happen.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“That's all I want. Just you and me. Always.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“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”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“This is what happens when you try to help people. You get screwed.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“You can build walls all the way to the sky and I will find a way to fly above them. You can try to pin me down with a hundred thousand arms, but I will find a way to resist. And there are many of us out there, more than you think. People who refuse to stop believing. People who refuse to come to earth. People who love in a world without walls, people who love into hate, into refusal, against hope, and without fear.

I love you. Remember. They cannot take it.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“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.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“Everyone is asleep. They've all been asleep for years. You seemed ... awake.' Alex is whispering now. He closes his eyes, opens them again.'I'm tired of sleeping.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“It's not my fault I can't be like you, okay? I don't get up in the morning thinking the world is one big, shiny, happy place, okay? That's just not how I work. I don't think I can be fixed.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“It's like a razor blade edging its way through my organs, shredding me, all I can think is: It will kill me, it will kill me, it will kill me. And I don't care.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“And I guess that's when it starts to hit me: the whole point is, you do what you can.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“Snapshots, moments, mere seconds: as fragile and beautiful and hopeless as a single butterfly, flapping on against a gathering wind.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“One of the strangest things about life is that it will chug on, blind and oblivious, even as your private world - your little carved-out sphere - is twisting and morphing, even breaking apart. One day you have parents; the next day you're an orphan. One day you have a place and a path. The next day you're lost in the wilderness.
And still the sun rises and clouds mass and drift and people shop for groceries and toilets flush and blinds go up and down. That's when you realize that most of it - life, the relentless mechanism of existing - isn't about you. It doesn't include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you've jumped the edge. Even after you're dead.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“„That's the flip side of freedom; When you're completely free, you're also completely on your own.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“That's when I realized that certain moments go on forever. Even after they're over they still go on, even after you're dead and buried, those moments are lasting still, backward and forward, on into infinity. They are everything and everywhere all at once.
They are the meaning.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“That's the way I feel, at least: like there's a real me and a reflection of me, and I have no way of telling which is which.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“Now I'd rather be infected with love for the tiniest sliver of a second than live a hundred years smothered by a lie.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“Everything looks beautiful. The Book of Shhh says that deliria alters your perception, disables your ability to reason clearly, impairs you from making sound judgments. But it does not tell you this: that love will turn the whole world into something greater than itself.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium