Top 500 Lauren Oliver Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Maybe it would be better if we didn’t love. If we didn’t lose, either. If we didn’t get out hearts stomped on, shattered; if we didn’t have to patch and repatch it until we’re like Frankenstein monsters, all sewn together by who knows what.”

— Lauren Oliver

152. “Take down the walls. That is, after all, the whole point. You do not know what will happen if you take down the walls; you cannot see through to the other side, don’t know whether it will bring freedom or ruin, resolution or chaos. It might paradise, or destruction. Take down the walls.”

— Lauren Oliver

153. “I let the music drill through my teeth and drip out my hair and pound through my eyeballs. I taste it, like grit and sweat.”

— Lauren Oliver

154. “My stomach gets that hollowed-out feeling. It’s amazing how words can do that, just shred your insides apart.”

— Lauren Oliver

155. “Hearts are fragile things. That’s why you have to be so careful.”

— Lauren Oliver

156. “The tunnels may be long, and twisted, and dark; but you are supposed to go through them.”

— Lauren Oliver

157. “Droplets, droplets: we are all identical drips and drops of people, hovering, waiting to be tipped, waiting for someone to show us the way, to pour us down a path.”

— Lauren Oliver

158. “The only thing worse than having no friends is being pitied for having no friends.”

— Lauren Oliver

159. “Black is too morbid; red will set them on edge; pink is too juvenile; orange is freakish.”

— Lauren Oliver

160. “Funny how things can stay the same forever and then change so quickly.”

— Lauren Oliver

161. “This was what true fear was – that you could never know other people, not completely. That you were always just guessing blind.”

— Lauren Oliver

162. “Amazing, isn’t it? That hearts that once beat in sync could be so perfectly and forever separated. That’s the whole process of life, I think: a long, slow process of separation. It can be cured only by the reabsorption into everything, into the single heartbeat of time.”

— Lauren Oliver

163. “It’s like a razor blade edging its way through my organs, shredding me, all I can think is: It will kill me, it will kill me, it will kill me. And I don’t care.”

— Lauren Oliver

164. “All this time, I thought we were growing apart because I was leaving Lena behind. But really it was the reverse. She was learning to lie. She was learning to love.”

— Lauren Oliver

165. “I’ve learned to get really good at this – say one thing when I’m thinking about something else, act like I’m listening when I’m not, pretend to be calm and happy when I’m really freaking out. It’s one of the skills you perfect as you get older.”

— Lauren Oliver

166. “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

167. “Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes.”

— Lauren Oliver

168. “I can admit, now, that I must have loved Lena. Not in an Unnatural way, but my feelings for her must have been a kind of sickness. How can someone have the power to shatter you to dust – and also to make you feel so whole?”

— Lauren Oliver

169. “For the first time in my life I’ve done something for me and by choice and not because somebody told me it was good or bad.”

— Lauren Oliver

170. “We wanted the freedom to love. We wanted the freedom to choose. Now we have to fight for it.”

— Lauren Oliver

171. “As soon as I look up, his eyes click onto my face. The breath whooshes out of my body and everything freezes for a second, as though I’m looking at him through my camera lens, zoomed in all the way, the world pausing for that tiny span of time between the opening and closing of the shutter.”

— Lauren Oliver

172. “Until, one day, she wasn’t.”

— Lauren Oliver

173. “El mundo entero es un fraude, una brillante, reluciente estafa.”

— Lauren Oliver

174. “The most dangerous sicknesses are those that make us believe we are well.”

— Lauren Oliver

175. “In my head I try and reach back, through the fence, past the smoke; I try and grab his hand and pull. Alex, come back. There is nothing to do but sink. The hours close around me, encase me completely, like a tomb.”

— Lauren Oliver

176. “Live free or die. Four words. Thirteen letters. Ridges, bumps, swirls under my fingertips. Another story. We cling tightly to it, and our belief turns it to truth.”

— Lauren Oliver

177. “But maybe you carried your demons with you everywhere, the way you carried your shadow.”

— Lauren Oliver

178. “In a world without love, this is what people are to each other: values, benefits, and liabilities, numbers and data. We weigh, we quantify, we measure, and the soul is ground to dust.”

— Lauren Oliver

179. “It amazes me how easy it is for things to change, how easy it is to start off down the same road you always take and wind up somewhere new. Just one false step, one pause, on detour...”

— Lauren Oliver

180. “Amor deliria nervosa: It affects your mind so that you cannot think clearly, or make rational decisions about your own well-being. Symptom number twelve.”

— Lauren Oliver

181. “And now I know why they invented words for love, why they had to: It’s the only thing that can come close to describing what I feel in that moment, the baffling mixture of pain and pleasure and fear and joy, all running sharply through me at once.”

— Lauren Oliver

182. “I don’t know whether these feelings – this thing growing inside of me – is something horrible and sick or the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Either way, I can’t stop it. I’ve lost control. And the truly sick thing is that despite everything, I’m glad.”

— Lauren Oliver

183. “I cry for everything I abandoned and because I, too, have been left behind – by Alex, by my mom, by time that has cut through our worlds and separated us.”

— Lauren Oliver

184. “You can build walls all the way to the sky and I will find a way to fly above them. You can try to pin me down with a hundred thousand arms, but I will find a way to resist.”

— Lauren Oliver

185. “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.”

— Lauren Oliver

186. “If you take, we will take back. Steal from us, and we will rob you blind. When you squeeze, we will hit. This is the way the world is made now.”

— Lauren Oliver

187. “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 you 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.”

— Lauren Oliver

188. “It strikes me how strange people are. You can see them every day, you can think you know them and then you found out you hardly know them at all.”

— Lauren Oliver

189. “He looks funny in a suit jacket, like a bear dressed up in costume for the circus. I would never tell him that, though.”

— Lauren Oliver

190. “That’s when you realize that most of it-life, the relentless mechanism of existing-isn’t about you. It doesn’t include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you’ve jumped the edge. Even after you’re dead.”

— Lauren Oliver

191. “I wish that photographs were physical spaces, like tunnels; that you could crawl inside them and go back.”

— Lauren Oliver

192. “Like I’ve been sketched by an amateur artist: if you don’t look too closely, it’s all right, but start focusing and all the smudges and mistakes become really obvious.”

— Lauren Oliver

193. “I’ve never really thought about it before, but it’s a miracle how many kinds of light there are in the world, how many skies: the pale brightness of spring, when it feels like the hole world’s blushing; the lush, bright boldness of a July noon; purple storm skies and a green queasiness just before lightning strikes and crazy multicolored sunsets that look like someone’s acid trip.”

— Lauren Oliver

194. “She was mine before she was yours.”

— Lauren Oliver

195. “There’s a place for everything and everyone, you know. That is the mistake they make above. They think that only certain people have a place. Only certain kinds of people belong. The rest is waste. But even waste must have a place. Otherwise it will clog and clot, and rot and fester.”

— Lauren Oliver

196. “Rainstorms are incredible: falling shards of glass, the air full of diamonds.”

— Lauren Oliver

197. “Maybe this is the secret to talking to boys – maybe you just have to be angry all the time.”

— Lauren Oliver

198. “What I meant was, you looked happier in the pictures.”

— Lauren Oliver

199. “The inside jokes weren’t inside jokes anymore. They had become stories. Nobody brought up the bad names or the bad times. And nobody felt sad as long as we could postpone tomorrow with more nostalgia.”

— Lauren Oliver

200. “We all need mantras, I guess – stories we tell ourselves to keep us going.”

— Lauren Oliver