Rooms Quotes

“It was unfair that people could pretend to be one thing when they were really something else. That they would get you on their side and then do nothing but fail, and fail, and fail again. People should come with warnings, like cigarette packs: involvement would kill you over time.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“Parents teach you a lot of things, but the most important thing they teach you is this: how people will fuck you up in the future. If they're any good, they teach you to get used to it.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“Funny, isn't it, how quickly the future becomes the past.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“But that's the beauty of life: time if yours to keep and to change. Just a few minutes can be sufficient to carve a new road, a new track. Just a few minutes, and the void is kept at bay. You will live forever with that new road inside of you, stretching away to a place suggested, barely, on the horizon. For the shortest time, shorter than the shortest second's breath, you get to stand up to infinity. But eventually, and always, infinity wins.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“People, Caroline thought, were like houses. They could open their doors. You could walk through their rooms and touch the objects hidden in their corners. But something--the structure, the wiring, the invisible mechanism that kept the whole thing standing--remained invisible, suggested only by the fact of its existing at all.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“This is how we grow: not up, but out, like trees—swelling to encompass all these stories, the promises and lies and bribes and habits.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“That's what everyone wanted, in the end: to be part of something bigger.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“Life’s the sum total of all our small mistakes, little tragedies, bad choices. Addition on top of addition. They pile up and pile up until the cost of keeping up appearances is too high and the weight is just too much. Then: collapse.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“Memory is as thick as mud. It rises up, it overwhelms. It sucks you down and freezes you where you stand. Thrash and kick and gnash your teeth. There's no escaping it.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“When a heart breaks, a firefly is born.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“Amazing, isn’t it? That hearts that once beat in sync could be so perfectly and forever separated. That’s the whole process of life, I think: a long, slow process of separation. It can be cured only by the reabsorption into everything, into the single heartbeat of time.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“But those are just words, and words are just stories, and eventually, always, stories come to an end.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“I learned to swallow words back, hold secrets on my tongue until they dissolved like soap bubbles.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“I guess it’s the same way trees grow around the very vines that are killing them, so they’re strangled and sustained all at once. After a long time, even pain can be a comfort.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“The gun was just the go-between. It was the loneliness that got me in the end.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“We make reality our own, handle it until it is soft as pressed butter.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“I suppose, in some sense, wills are like maps: they are the imprint we leave, the places our affections have been entrenched; the work we have done; the money we have burrowed away; the furrows and the paths that lead back to spaces we have gone, and marked, and loved.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“Parents teach us our very first lesson about love: that you sure as hell don't get to choose it.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“It all boils down to the same thing: are you going to play the cards you got, or are you going to fold?”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“We’re all just a collection of wires pulled tight, charged beyond capacity—a tangle of plugs and valves, waiting for a surge to take down the whole system.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“I guess we all have some of these - memories like artillery shells, fired at close range.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“Certain stories must remain mine, so that there is a me to remain.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“She’s like a person looking through the wrong end of a telescope, complaining that everything looks small.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“Or maybe it's life that is the infection: a feverish dream, a hallucination of feelings. Death is purification, a cleansing, a cure.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“She had never seen snow before, except in TV shows and movies. It had looked to her like the stars were flaking out of the sky. It had looked like thousands of fireflies in the moonlight; like breathlessness, like time stopping, like the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“And yet there were times when I felt my life full of such richness, such fullness, I couldn't express it, couldn't speak or breathe a word because I feared the disruption--even a single breath could ruin it, like wind over a pond. I didn't want even a ripple.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“The world has nothing to offer me, no single shred of interest. I'm a woman trapped on a balcony, watching a passing parade, a blur of noise and motion that eventually turns to a single point on the horizon, a gutter full of trampled and muddy cups, and the sense of wasting an afternoon.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“Up and down, up and down, a ladder of choices leading to the next choice, and the next, until suddenly you've run out of choices, and ladder, and you find time as rare and thin as air on a mountain. Then it's oops, sorry, turn's over.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“That's modernity, if you ask me: endless division.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms

“It [death] isn't an infection, she said. She might be right. Then again, we've nested in the walls like bacteria. We've taken over the house, its insulation and its plumbing —we've made it our own.

Or maybe it's life that it's the infection: a feverish dream, a hallucination of feelings. Death is purification, a cleansing, a cure.”
― Lauren Oliver, Rooms