Top 180 Lauren DeStefano Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “This was the way it had always been between them. The world tried to destroy them, but they kept each other alive.”

— Lauren DeStefano

152. “I should not have loved my daughter as I did. Not in this world in which nothing lives for long. You children are flies. You are roses. You multiply and die.”

— Lauren DeStefano

153. “Death itself is no match for you. The day you were born, it shrank away in fear.”

— Lauren DeStefano

154. “The clouds took on the shape of dancers; from somewhere far off, Pram heard music before the clouds became normal again.”

— Lauren DeStefano

155. “I’m suddenly finding it hard to know the difference between nightmares and consciousness.”

— Lauren DeStefano

156. “We were his disposable things. Brought to him like cattle. Stripped of what made us sisters or daughters or children. There was nothing that he could take from us – our genes, our bones, our wombs – that would ever satisfy him. There was no other way that we would be free.”

— Lauren DeStefano

157. “None of the wives mention the security guards by the door, who will probably tackle us to the ground if we try to leave without our husbands.”

— Lauren DeStefano

158. “There are pillow creases on her face, and she cringes whenever she moves her legs.”

— Lauren DeStefano

159. “I watch the ashes swim around like dandelion puffs, making swirls where bodies and walls once stood.”

— Lauren DeStefano

160. “And everywhere girls, tumbling from trees like orange blossoms and hitting the earth with sickening thuds. They crack open.”

— Lauren DeStefano

161. “I start trying to stay unconscious. The problem with this is that no amount of willpower can change the reality.”

— Lauren DeStefano

162. “They are paper cutouts rather than people, Pram thought. They are shadows with black dots for eyes and grim lines for mouths. They almost resemble the dead, but not quite.”

— Lauren DeStefano

163. “It doesn’t matter how much his mother loves him; love is not enough to keep any of us alive.”

— Lauren DeStefano

164. “He sits next to me, careful to avoid my hair that’s splayed out around my head like blood. A bullet to the forehead, boom, blond waves everywhere.”

— Lauren DeStefano

165. “Times like this, when she slips her hand into mine and holds on tight, and our husband becomes just a shadow in the doorway.”

— Lauren DeStefano

166. “We writers are resilient souls.”

— Lauren DeStefano

167. “It’s never right to give up on someone.”

— Lauren DeStefano

168. “He was now working his way through the many shades of grief. Sadness made everything gray, he’d learned, but there were different types of gray, some darker than others. There were dark spots in his memories he wasn’t brave enough to enter.”

— Lauren DeStefano

169. “I see an ocean that’s spilled out of a wineglass, its body clear and sparkling and folding over itself. I see a ribbon of sand.”

— Lauren DeStefano

170. “A strange thing, words. Once they’re said, it’s hard to imagine they’re untrue.”

— Lauren DeStefano

171. “Living in a place like this, she must have learned how to see all the monsters that can hide a person.”

— Lauren DeStefano

172. “We’ll squeeze every second that we can from our lives, because we’re young, and we have plenty of years to grow. We’ll grow until we’re braver. We’ll grow until our bones ache and our skin wrinkles and our hair goes white, and until our hearts decide, at last, that it’s time to stop.”

— Lauren DeStefano

173. “Kettle thingies. Yum.”

— Lauren DeStefano

174. “Vaughn is talking about the heat, and his voice is so excited that it breaks into whispers at times. He loves his madness the way a bird loves the sky.”

— Lauren DeStefano

175. “They’re dead. We’re alive. We have things to do.”

— Lauren DeStefano

176. “We didn’t make ourselves,” she says. “We aren’t the greatest things to exist. I can’t believe that. I won’t believe that. We have too many faults.”

— Lauren DeStefano

177. “Forget who you are and what you think is there, and you’ll discover things that don’t exist to be known.”

— Lauren DeStefano

178. “I want to make the world into something better so that he can be okay.”

— Lauren DeStefano

179. “Hope, that risky, illustrious thing. It should have gone extinct by now, but we keep it alive.”

— Lauren DeStefano

180. “I hold on because you never know in this place when something good will be taken away.”

— Lauren DeStefano

181. “I was taught to speak and write a dozen languages, but there isn’t a word for what you mean to me.”

— Lauren DeStefano

182. “I wanted so badly to tell him, but something about that entire night seemed so beautiful, so bizarre, that I didn’t trust it with my secrets.”

— Lauren DeStefano

183. “I liked just being with you. I liked the way you breathed when you were asleep. I liked when you took the champagne glass from my hand. I liked how your fingers were always too long for your gloves.”

— Lauren DeStefano

184. “There are so many of us, so many girls. The world wants us for our wombs or our bodies, or it doesn’t want us at all. It steals us, destroys us, piles us like dying cattle in circus tents and leaves us lying in filth and perfume until we’re wanted again.”

— Lauren DeStefano

185. “I wonder what it’s like for her, looking so much like a dead girl.”

— Lauren DeStefano

186. “She wished that when her heart was beating double, she could give one of those hearts to him and then press her ear to his chest and feel it beating.”

— Lauren DeStefano

187. “The seeds are tiny, unborn things, and I resent them. They’ll be planted and they’ll grow into exactly what they’re meant to be.”

— Lauren DeStefano

188. “When you were little, you were like a question mark with eyes.”

— Lauren DeStefano

189. “Maybe I’d hoped for something magical or historic, but all I see is greed.”

— Lauren DeStefano

190. “There was a desperate undercurrent to our marriage – a feeling of being in a dream from which I couldn’t seem to awaken. A nagging sense that my life, laid out so neatly like the clothes Deirdre left on my divan, was no longer my own.”

— Lauren DeStefano

191. “Did you tell freedom hello for me?”

— Lauren DeStefano

192. “There is a need, in every world, to believe in things that cannot be seen.”

— Lauren DeStefano

193. “This isn’t living, what all of us are doing. We drive down long, dilapidated back roads.”

— Lauren DeStefano

194. “The sullen boy sitting before me is not my husband, and the girl he is fretting over isn’t me, will never be me.”

— Lauren DeStefano

195. “There are different sorts of geniuses. You’re one too. I’ve never met a person with your ability to make peace” -Judas.”

— Lauren DeStefano

196. “His three wives are huddled together on the bare mattress, one of them dying; when we’re together, we form an alliance he can’t touch. He’s scared to even try.”

— Lauren DeStefano

197. “She’s outgrowing her memories. We both are.”

— Lauren DeStefano

198. “Perhaps it’s different for girls,” Wil said. “’ We’re told who we’re meant to be, and we strive to be just that, even if we know it isn’t right. Love is used as a weapon against us. When we don’t do as we’re told, it gets taken away, and when we do, it’s returned again like a treasured doll.”

— Lauren DeStefano

199. “Rhine. The river that, somewhere out there, has broken free.”

— Lauren DeStefano