Before I Fall

by Lauren Oliver

The whole point of growing up is learning to stay on the laughing side.

When we get out of high school we’ll look back and know we did everything right, that we kissed the cutest boys and went to the best parties, got in just enough trouble, listened to our music too loud, smoked too many cigarettes, and drank too much and laughed too much and listened too little, or not at all.

A good friend keeps your secrets for you. A best friend helps you keep your own secrets.

Try not to judge. Remember that we’re the same, you and me. I thought I would live forever too.

When you’re young you just want to be older, and then later you wish you could go back to being a kid.

Here’s another thing to remember: hope keeps you alive. Even when you’re dead, it’s the only thing that keeps you alive.

An article I once read said that crazy people don’t worry about being crazy—that’s the whole problem.

“They’re teenagers. They do the opposite of what you say. That’s part of the deal. Pimples, pubic hair, and bad attitude.” I almost lose it when Otto says pubic hair, and I think Ms. Winters will lecture him, but she only says, “Sometimes I don’t know why I bother.”

Here’s one of the things I learned that morning: if you cross a line and nothing happens, the line loses meaning.

This is pretty much the answer to every problem you encounter in suburbia: plant a tree, and hope you don’t see anyone’s privates.

That’s the thing about best friends. That’s what they do. They keep you from spinning off the edge.

Like there’s no continuity in people at all. Like something ruptures when you hit twelve, or thirteen, or whatever the age is when you’re no longer a kid but a “young adult,” and after that you’re a totally different person. Maybe even a less happy person. Maybe even a worse one.

And I guess that’s when it starts to hit me: the whole point is, you do what you can.

by Thomas Wolfe, “You can’t go home again”—isn’t necessarily that places change, but that people do. So nothing ever looks the same.

I suppose that’s the secret, if you’re ever wishing for things to go back to the way they were. You just have to look up.

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.

The details that are my life’s special pattern, like how in handwoven rugs what really makes them unique are the tiny flaws in the stitching, little gaps and jumps and stutters that can never be reproduced. So many things become beautiful when you really look.

I’m going to be the kind of person who would be remembered well, not just remembered.

I think about the dream I was having for a while, where I’m walking through a party and everyone looks familiar except for one thing, something off. I wonder if the real point of that dream was not that other people were transforming, but that I was.

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.

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.

Sometimes I’m afraid to go to sleep because of what I’m leaving behind.