Top 180 Lauren DeStefano Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Silence was not the absence of presence – it was its own presence.”

— Lauren DeStefano

102. “There’s a sort of dead passion in him. A spark that, had he more years to live, would be a wildfire.”

— Lauren DeStefano

103. “I’ll tell you something about true love. There’s no science to it. It’s as natural as the sky.”

— Lauren DeStefano

104. “Write words you’re willing to burn at the stake for. Write words you’d believe in even if the rest of the world didn’t.”

— Lauren DeStefano

105. “We can change so many times in our lives. We’re born into a family, and it’s the only life we can imagine, but it changes. Buildings collapse. Fires burn. And the next second we’re someplace else entirely, going through different motions and trying to keep up with this new person we’ve become.”

— Lauren DeStefano

106. “And if I have to die trying, I will get out of here.”

— Lauren DeStefano

107. “Bravery is still the thing that sets change in motion” -Morgan.”

— Lauren DeStefano

108. “My father warned me that you’re an interloper. He told me I should make you leave, since we’re no longer married and you’re not my concern,” he says. The thought gives me a chill. Yes, I’m sure Vaughn would love for his son to abandon me, so that Vaughn can swoop in and reclaim me the second I’m alone. But Linden adds, “I told him that wouldn’t be a good idea either.”

— Lauren DeStefano

109. “Everyone should remember being born. It doesn’t seem fair that we only remember dying.”

— Lauren DeStefano

110. “My worries always lead to dungeons; I can’t imagine a worse thing than to be imprisoned for the rest of one’s life, especially with so few years to enjoy what little there is.”

— Lauren DeStefano

111. “No matter how lonely it makes me, and no matter how wide and horrific the loneliness, at least I remember who I am.”

— Lauren DeStefano

112. “Words like ‘unputdownable’ and ‘irresistible’ are simply not enough for Cat Winters’s In the Shadow of Blackbirds. Days after finishing this story, it remains the first thought I have in the morning, and the thing that haunts me until I sleep.”

— Lauren DeStefano

113. “I run into fires, not from them.”

— Lauren DeStefano

114. “The months fall to shards at my feet.”

— Lauren DeStefano

115. “Just being alive feels so arduous that all I want to do is climb under the covers and sleep.”

— Lauren DeStefano

116. “PEOPLE USED to be connected to one another all the time. That’s what my parents told me. Everyone had phones and computers. Everyone called and kept in touch. They used to be everything, these things that are barely remembered now. These things that mean nothing to me.”

— Lauren DeStefano

117. “Childhood is a long, long road, from which that dark whispering forest of death seems an impossible destination.”

— Lauren DeStefano

118. “You can’t just stand there if you want something to fly. You have to run” -Cecily.”

— Lauren DeStefano

119. “I don’t know how it happens. We move our faces at the same time, and then our lips are touching. I’ve lost my worries. Traded them in for the sun and the taste of his tongue and the thought that in sixty years we’ll be ashes – we’ll be tossed into the air and after a moment of weightlessness we’ll be everywhere and nowhere. But for now there’s quick breathing and the feeling like he has my heart in his palm as it beats outside my chest.”

— Lauren DeStefano

120. “I think humans have always been desperate. I think it has always been about doing something awful if it might help, when the only other option is death. Maybe that’s what being a parent is supposed to feel like.”

— Lauren DeStefano

121. “She knew that the dead hid pieces of themselves in the world. They buried organs in the living. They stuffed memories into trees and clouds and other innocuous things.”

— Lauren DeStefano

122. “On tiptoes the redhead wouldn’t even reach my shoulders; she is clearly too young to be a bride. And the willowy girl is too forlorn. And I am too unwilling. Yet here we are.”

— Lauren DeStefano

123. “When we were first married, I thought he must have been the most heartless, hateful man I’d ever known, but he was just as much a prisonor as I was. Where Vaughn imprisoned me with walls, he imprisoned his son with ignorance.”

— Lauren DeStefano

124. “It wasn’t enough that they stole our future; they had to steal our past.”

— Lauren DeStefano

125. “I used to have only one name; it used to mean something.”

— Lauren DeStefano

126. “It taught that there are three versions of things: the one I see in my mind, and the one that carries onto the paper, and then what it ultimately becomes.”

— Lauren DeStefano

127. “Life is much different from the days when there were lilies in my mother’s garden, and all my secrets fit into a paper cup.”

— Lauren DeStefano

128. “She was a drawing that hadn’t been colored.”

— Lauren DeStefano

129. “To lose one’s mother was to lose the beginning of one’s life story.”

— Lauren DeStefano

130. “Birdie’s presence was gentle and quiet, but her absence is violent.”

— Lauren DeStefano

131. “She’s a commodity in a sea of broken girls.”

— Lauren DeStefano

132. “Wanting to be happy is not stupid.”

— Lauren DeStefano

133. “He says one word, nodding into the daylight. “Look.” It’s an astounding word. It’s a gift.”

— Lauren DeStefano

134. “I don’t know if it was love or an illusion. I don’t know if there’s ever a way to be certain.”

— Lauren DeStefano

135. “Maybe what frightens us about the edge isn’t our fear of morality, but the thoughts it leads us to have.”

— Lauren DeStefano

136. “But I know all the things you’re too sweet to know.”

— Lauren DeStefano

137. “You look like you’ve never done a thing wrong in your life, and people like that lack common sense” -Judas.”

— Lauren DeStefano

138. “When I am writing anything in general, I just want to tell the story that exists in my head; I don’t try to write a parable or make a point.”

— Lauren DeStefano

139. “I want to have my questions. I want to have more thoughts than my mind can hold.”

— Lauren DeStefano

140. “It is the face of a girl who has seen the world, who realizes that it hates her, and who hates it in return.”

— Lauren DeStefano

141. “Violence is the only way to achieve freedom, it seems. I wouldn’t have thought so before all of this. My escape plan was a more peaceful one, but I know now that it wouldn’t have been successful.”

— Lauren DeStefano

142. “The thing about hope is that it doesn’t go away even when it serves no purpose.”

— Lauren DeStefano

143. “You can’t be afraid. You can be sad if you like. You can be angry. But it’s the fear that’ll freeze you in place.”

— Lauren DeStefano

144. “She would do anything, anything to belong to his son after a lifetime of belonging to no one at all.”

— Lauren DeStefano

145. “We figure out what death means when we’re born, practically, and we live our whole lives in some kind of weird denial about it.”

— Lauren DeStefano

146. “We are stronger than we’ve credited ourselves to be. We have been the victims and the witnesses. We have said a lifetime of good-byes.”

— Lauren DeStefano

147. “I was born into a world that was already dying; I belong to it.”

— Lauren DeStefano

148. “It’s your way,′ he says. ‘When you were little, you were like a question mark with eyes.”

— Lauren DeStefano

149. “My sisters were in that van.”

— Lauren DeStefano

150. “Felix had left his heart buried in the ground years ago, but he felt it crack apart.”

— Lauren DeStefano