Quotes By Author: Lauren Oliver

“At the same time I know that it’s not really their fault, at least not completely. I did my part too. I did it on a hundred different days and in a thousand different ways, and I know it. But this makes the anger worse, not better.”

“The hours here are flat and round, disks of gray layered one on top of the other…they move slowly, at a grind, until it seems as though they are not moving at all. They are just pressing down…”

“Everyone just wasting time because they have so much of it to waste, minutes slipping by on who’s with who and did you hear.”

“My point is: maybe you can afford to wait. Maybe for you there’s a tomorrow. Maybe for you there’s one thousand tomorrows, or three thousand, or ten, so much time you can bathe in it, roll around it, let it slide like coins through your fingers. So much time you can waste it.But for some of us there’s only today. And the truth is, you never really know.”

“The secret is,” I say, whispering right into his ear, “that yours was the best kiss I’ve ever had in my life.”“But I’ve never kissed you,” he whispers back. Around us the rain sounds like falling glass. “Not since third grade, anyway.” I smile, but I’m not sure if he can see it.“Better get started, then,” I say, “because I don’t have much time.”

“Sometimes I feel like if you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you – sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever.”

“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.”

“But before you start pointing fingers, let me ask you: is what I did really so bad? So bad I deserved to die? So bad I deserved to die like that?Is what I did really so much worse than what anybody else does? Is it really so much worse than what you do?Think about it.”

“Of all the miracles Po had seen in the time and space of its death, Po thought this–the absorption of another, the carrying of it–was the most bewildering and remarkable of all. Whenever Bundle separated again, Po was left with an ache of sadness that reminded the ghost of the body it had left behind.”

“It was all very strange, Mr. Gray thought, as he wiped the coffee canister clean with a sponge. Very, very mysterious. You were born; you lived a whole life; and at the end, you wound up in a coffee canister.”Ah, well,” he said out loud quietly. “That’s just the way things are. Life’s a funny business.” Death, he supposed, was the punch line.”

“And suddenly it’s all so ridiculously and stupidly clear I feel like laughing. This is what I want. This is the only thing i’ve ever wanted. Everything else—every single second of every single day that has come before this very moment, this kiss—has meant nothing.”

“His eyes are blazing with light, more light than all the lights in every city in the whole world, more light than we could ever invent if we had ten thousand billion years.”

“Nothing has ever been so painful or delicious as being so close to him and being unable to do anything about it: like eating ice cream so fast on a hot day you get a splitting headache.”

“Now I lay me down to sleep,I pray the Lord my soul to keep,If I should die before I ‘wake,I pray the Lord my soul to take”

“Two weeks until your cure” she says finally. “Sixteen days” I say, but in my head I’m counting: Seven days. Seven days until I’m free and away from all these people and their sliding superficial lives brushing past one another gliding, gliding, gliding from life to death. For them there’s hardly a change between the two.”