Delirium (Delirium, #1)

by Lauren Oliver

‘So infected with deliria and in violation of the pacts of society, she fell in love with men who would not have her or could not keep her.’

I’ll tell you another secret, this one for your own good. You may think the past has something to tell you. You may think that you should listen, should strain to make out its whispers, should bend over backward, stoop down low to hear its voice breathed up from the ground, from the dead places. You may think there’s something in it for you, something to understand or make sense of. But I know the truth: I know from the nights of Coldness. I know the past will drag you backward and down, have you snatching at whispers of wind and the gibberish of trees rubbing together, trying to decipher some code, trying to piece together what was broken. It’s hopeless. The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone. Take it from me: if you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging at your back and running its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do – the only thing – is run.

You came from different starts and you’ll come to different ends:

all I can think is: It will kill me, it will kill me, it will kill me. And I don’t care.

‘That’s when you really lose people, you know. When the pain passes.’

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. Before and after – and during, a moment no bigger or longer than an edge.

Either way, I can’t stop it. I’ve lost control. And the truly sick thing is that despite everything, I’m glad.

Love, the deadliest of all deadly things: it kills you both when you have it and when you don’t.