Vanishing Girls Quotes

“Sometimes people stop loving you. And that's the kind of darkness that never gets fixed, no matter how many moons rise again, filling the sky with a weak approximation of light.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“That's what life is, pretty much: full of holes and tangles and ways to get stuck. Uncomfortable and itchy. A present you never asked for, never wanted, never chose. A present you're supposed to be excited to wear, day after day, even when you'd rather stay in bed and do nothing.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“I wish that photographs were physical spaces, like tunnels; that you could crawl inside them and go back.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“I guess that's the really nice thing about disappearing: the part where people look for you and beg you to come home.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“Funny how things can stay the same forever and then change so quickly.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“You broke my heart.
I fell for you and you broke my heart.
Period, done, end of story.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“The funny thing about almost-dying is that afterward everyone expects you to jump on the happy train and take time to chase butterflies through grassy fields or see rainbows in puddles of oil on the highway. It’s a miracle, they’ll say with an expectant look, as if you’ve been given a big old gift and you better not disappoint Grandma by pulling a face when you unwrap the box and find a lumpy, misshapen sweater.

That’s what life is, pretty much: full of holes and tangles and ways to get stuck. Uncomfortable and itchy. A present you never asked for, never wanted, never chose. A present you’re supposed to be excited to wear, day after day, even when you’d rather stay in bed and do nothing.

The truth is this: it doesn’t take any skill to almost-die, or to almost-live, either.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“Sometimes day and night reverse. Sometimes up goes down and down goes up, and love turns into hate, and the things you counted on get washed out from under your feet, leaving you pedaling in the air.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“There's a metaphor in that somewhere—like all of life is about ending up somewhere you didn't expect, and learning to just be happy with it.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“That's the problem with therapists: you have to pay them to say the same dumb shit other people will tell you for free.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“This is it: somehow, in these pictures, the mystery of the accident is contained, and the explanation for Dara's subsequent behavior, for the silences and disappearances. Don't ask me how. I just do. If you don't understand that, I guess you've never had a sister”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“Sometimes day and night reverse. Sometimes up goes down and down goes up, and love turns into hate, and the things you counted on get washed out from under your feet, leaving you pedaling in the air. Sometimes people stop loving you. And that's the kind of darkness that never gets fixed, no matter how many moons rise again, filling the sky with a weak approximation of light.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“How convenient if you could see what was wrong with people right away, if they wore their sicknesses and crimes on their skin like tattoos.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“Memory is like that, too. We build careful bridges. But they're weaker than we think.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“Sometimes people stop loving you. And that’s the kind of darkness that never gets fixed,”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“He doesn't love me. He never loved me. All along, he's loved her.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“There's something backward about living in a place so obsessed with the past; it's like everyone's given up on the idea of a future.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“You see, even then, I knew. It wasn't a trick. It wasn't a show. Sometimes day and night reverse. Sometimes up goes down and down goes up, and love turns into hate, and the things you counted on get washed out from under your feet, leaving you pedaling in the air.

Sometimes people stop loving you. And that's the kind of darkness that never gets fixed, no matter how many moons rise again, filling the sky with a weak approximation of light.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“We stay like that for a long time, side by side, holding hands, until the crickets, obeying the same ancient law that pulls the sun from the sky and throws the moon up after it, that strips autumn down to winter and pushes spring up afterward, obeying the law of closure and new beginnings, send their voices up from the silence, and sing.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“The windows are open, admitting the September breeze: a month that smells like notepaper and pencil shavings, autumn leaves and car oil. A month that smells like progress, like moving on.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“If you don't watch out, they'll grab you. They'll take you to the underworld and turn you into a bride.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“Still more people are arriving:so many people, it makes you wonder how all of them could exist, how there can be so many individual lives and stories and needs and disappointments.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“And yet in only a few hours we've managed to erase her almost entirely. All of her things - bought, received, painstakingly selected; her tastes and preferences; all the random stuff accumulated over the years - all of it sorted, trashed, or packed up in less than a day. How easily we get erased.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“I hope she's alive. Even more, I believe.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“I don't know which is worse: that I'm home and so much is different, or that I'm home and so much feels the same.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“There’s a fundamental rule of the universe that goes like this: if you’re running late, you will miss your bus. You’ll also miss your bus if it’s raining or if you have somewhere really important to go, like the SATs or a driver’s test.

Dara and I have a word for that kind of luck: crapdiment. Just crap smeared on top of more crap.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“La cosa buffa del quasi-morire è che poi tutti si aspettano che tu viva a bordo del treno della felicità, che passi il tempo a rincorrere le farfalle su prati verdi o a guardare arcobaleni nelle macchie di benzina sulla strada. È un miracolo! Diranno tutti, con uno sguardo pieno di aspettative. È come quando ricevi in regalo un maglione sgualcito e sformato e non devi deludere la nonna con una strana smorfia quando scarti la scatola.
Dopo tutto questa è la vita: piena di buche e grovigli e punti nei quali bloccarsi. Scomoda e irritante. Un regalo che non avevi mai chiesto, mai voluto e mai scelto. Un regalo che dovrai indossare con eccitazione, giorno dopo giorno, anche quando preferiresti startene nel tuo letto a far nulla.
La verità è questa: non servono particolari requisiti per quasi-morire, e nemmeno per quasi-vivere.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“Everyone has the pushed and prodded and tugged look that rich people have, like they're just giant pieces of taffy, ready to be molded.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“There are many words in the English language that you never want to hear you father say. Enema. Orgasm. Disappointed.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

“Magnetism, my chem teacher would call it. The seeking for a thing of its pair.”
― Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls