Delirium (Delirium, #1)

by Lauren Oliver

The deadliest of all deadly things: It kills you both when you have it and when you don’t.

“You can’t be really happy unless you’re unhappy sometimes. You know that, right?”

Most things, even the greatest movements on earth, have their beginnings in something small.

Every time he brushes me with his fingers, time seems to teeter for a second, like it is in danger of dissolving. The whole world is dissolving, I decide, except for us. Us.

“I just want to be normal, like everybody else.” “Are you sure that being like everybody else will make you happy?”

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 a 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.