"There is only what you want and what happens. There is only grabbing on and holding tight in the darkness."
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Quote collection
Lauren Oliver quotes (page 21 of 27)
525 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"I’m Hana,” Hana says. “And this is Lena.” She jabs me with an elbow. I know I must look like a fish, standing there with my mouth gaping open, but I’m too outraged to speak. He’s lying. I know he’s the one I saw yesterday, would bet my life on it. “Alex. Nice to meet you.” Alex keeps his eyes on me as he and Hana shake hands. Then he extends a hand to me. “Lena,” he says thoughtfully. “I’ve never heard that name before."
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"We're on the other side of the fence now, Lena,' she says, tiredly, as she passes. "Don't you get it? You can't tell me what to feel."
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"I start to back away before I do something wildly inappropriate, like jump on top of him."
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"Maybe this is the secret to talking to boys--maybe you just have to be angry all the time."
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"We should be protected from the people who will leave us in the end, from all the people who will disappear or forget us."
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"What I meant was, you looked happier in the pictures."
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"Everything ends, people move on, they don't look back. It's how they should be."
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"Poetry isn't like any writing I've ever heard before. I don't understand all of it, just bits of images, sentences that appear half-finished, all fluttering together like brightly colored ribbons in the wind."
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"Maybe before you die, it's your ghosts you see."
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"Grief is like sinking, like being buried. I am in water the tawny color of kicked-up dirt. Every breath is full of choking. There is nothing to hold on to, no sides, no way to claw myself up. There is nothing to do but let go. Let go. Feel the weight all around you, feel the squeezing of your lungs, the slow, low pressure. Let yourself go deeper. There is nothing but bottom. There is nothing but the taste of metal, and the echoes of old things, and days that look like darkness."
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"That's the thing: We didn't really care. A world without love is also a world without stakes."
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"Waste today, want tomorrow."
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"There is nothing else for people to do. They do not think. They feel no passion, no hatred, no sadness; they feel nothing but fear, and a desire to control. So they watch, and poke, and pry."
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"At a certain point your brain stops to rationalize things. At a certain point it gives up, shuts off, shuts down."
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"It's the time of the night I like best, when most people are asleep and it feels like the world belongs completely to my friends and me, as though nothing exists apart from out little circle: everywhere else is darkness and quiet."
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"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."
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"That's the beauty of the cure. No one mentions those lost, hot days in the field, when Thomas kissed Rachel's tears away and invented worlds just so he could promise them to her, when she tore the skin off her own arm at the thought of living without him."
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"I have had to give up so much, so many selves and lives already. I have grown up and out of the rubble of my old lives, of things and people I have cared for."
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"I still wanted to know why. As though somebody was going to answer that for me, as though any answer would be satisfying."
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