Top 500 Lauren Oliver Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “That is the rule of the Wilds: You must be bigger and stronger and tougher. You must hurt or be hurt.”

— Lauren Oliver

202. “Every choice is limited. That’s life.”

— Lauren Oliver

203. “Most of the time – 99 percent of the time – you just don’t know how and why the threads are looped together, and that’s okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes.”

— Lauren Oliver

204. “No wonder the regulators decided on segregation of boys and girls: Otherwise, it would have been a nightmare, this feeling angry and self-conscious and confused and annoyed all the time.”

— Lauren Oliver

205. “I’d rather die on my own terms than live on theirs.”

— Lauren Oliver

206. “Sometimes day and night reverse. Sometimes up goes down and down goes up, and love turns into hate, and the things you counted on get washed out from under your feet, leaving you pedaling in the air. 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

207. “I’m not the Hana everyone told me I would be after my cure.”

— Lauren Oliver

208. “Sorry is one of the worst words of all: it hardly ever means what you want it to” -Mia.”

— Lauren Oliver

209. “A strange and baffling truth: that the people we’re supposed to know best can turn out to be strangers, and that near strangers can feel so much like home.”

— Lauren Oliver

210. “Another day bleeds out on the horizon, red and pink and gold; staring up at the sky.”

— Lauren Oliver

211. “That’s what heartbreak feels like: a little death” -Brynn.”

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

213. “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

214. “This is the past: It drifts, it gathers. If you are not careful, it will bury you.”

— Lauren Oliver

215. “For all the people who have infected me with amor deliria nervosa in the past – you know who you are. For the people who will infect me in the future – I can’t wait to see who you’ll be. And in both cases: Thank you.”

— Lauren Oliver

216. “I loved to be alone in the woods, especially in the late fall when everything is crisp and golden, the leaves the color of fire, and it smells like things turning into earth. I loved the silence – the only sound the steady drum of the hooves and the horse’s breathing.”

— Lauren Oliver

217. “A room full of words that are nearly the truth but not quite, each note fluttering off the steam of its rose like a broken butterfly wing.”

— Lauren Oliver

218. “I don’t love you, Lena. Do you hear me? I never love you.”

— Lauren Oliver

219. “That’s the thing about best friends. That’s what they do. They keep you from spinning off the edge.”

— Lauren Oliver

220. “They didn’t get me, I should have said. They saved me.”

— Lauren Oliver

221. “I am tired of fighting, of hitting and being hit. This is the strange way of the world, that people who simply want to love are instead forced to become warriors. It’s the upside-down nature of life.”

— Lauren Oliver

222. “He’s speaking in the tone of voice that everyone uses when they’re about to break you apart. Gentle – kind, even – like they can make the news sound better just by speaking in a lullaby voice.”

— Lauren Oliver

223. “My heart shoots into my throat every time I think I see his loping walk, or catch sight of some floppy brown hair on a boy – but it’s never him, and each time it isn’t, my heart does a reverse trajectory down into the very pit of my stomach.”

— Lauren Oliver

224. “With the cure, relationships are all the same, and rules and expectations are defined. Without the cure, relationships must be reinvented every day, languages constantly decoded and deciphered. Freedom is exhausting.”

— Lauren Oliver

225. “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

226. “That’s the thing about hearts. They don’t get put back together, not really. They just get patched. But the damage is still there.”

— Lauren Oliver

227. “Everywhere he touches is fire. My whole body is burning up, the two of us becoming twin points of the same bright white flame.”

— Lauren Oliver

228. “The Story of Solomon is the only way I know how to explain. And then, in smaller letters: Forgive me.”

— Lauren Oliver

229. “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

230. “You must hurt, or be hurt.”

— Lauren Oliver

231. “You don’t reach points in life at which everything is sorted out for us. I believe in endings that should suggest our stories always continue.”

— Lauren Oliver

232. “I hate skin; I hate bones and bodies. I want to curl up inside of him and be carried there forever.”

— Lauren Oliver

233. “I get that rush that comes when you know you’re doing something wrong and are getting away with it, like stealing from the school cafeteria of getting tipsy at a family holiday without anyone knowing it.”

— Lauren Oliver

234. “Before we were the Monsters of Brickhouse Lane – before everyone from Connecticut to California knew us by that tagline, and blogs ran pictures of our faces, and searching our names led to sites that crashed from all the traffic – we were just girls, and there were only two of us.”

— Lauren Oliver

235. “The horizon is touched with red: the sun is rising, a rusty colour, the colour of old blood, and I’m so filled with fear it is an agony, a shredding feeling, worse than any nightmare I’ve ever had.”

— Lauren Oliver

236. “Despite the fact that Raven and Tack are often fighting, it’s impossible to imagine one without the other. They are like two plants that have grown around each other – they strangle and squeeze and support at the same time.”

— Lauren Oliver

237. “Quiet through the grave go I; or else beneath the graves I lie.”

— Lauren Oliver

238. “I thought you were dead,” I say. “It almost killed me.” “Did it?” His voice is neutral. “You made a pretty fast recovery.”

— Lauren Oliver

239. “I keep having the urge to cross my hands over my chest, to cover up my breasts, to hide. I’m suddenly aware of how pale I look in the sunshine, and how many moles I have spotting up and down my chest, and I just know he’s looking at me thinking i’m wrong or deformed. But the he breathes, ‘Beautiful’ and when his eyes meet mine I know that he really, truly means it.”

— Lauren Oliver

240. “It does seem like the chocolate brings good luck.”

— Lauren Oliver

241. “Amor deliria nervosa isn’t a disease of love. It’s a disease of selfishness.”

— Lauren Oliver

242. “We are always being pushed and squeezed down one road or another. We have no choice but to step forward, and then step forward again, and then step forward again; suddenly we find ourselves on a road we haven’t chosen at all.”

— Lauren Oliver

243. “They told us love was a disease. They told us it would kill us in the end. For the very first time I realize, that this, too, might also be a lie.”

— Lauren Oliver

244. “Chance. Stupid, dumb, blind chance. Just a part of the strange mechanism of the world, with its fits and coughs and starts and random collisions.”

— Lauren Oliver

245. “Julian sucks in a deep breath. Then, all in a rush, he says, “I love you.” Just as I blurt out, “Don’t say it.” There’s another beat of silence. Julian looks startled. “What?” he finally says. I wish I could take the words back. I wish I could say I love you, too. But the words are caught in the cage of my chest. “Julian, you have to know how much I care about you.” I try to touch him, and he jerks backward. “Don’t,” he says.”

— Lauren Oliver

246. “An itchy feeling began to work its way through my body, as though a thousand mosquitoes were circulating through my blood, biting me from the inside, making me want to scream, jump, squirm. I ran.”

— Lauren Oliver

247. “I guess it was bound to happen eventually. I’ve always known it would. Everyone you trust, everyone you think you can count on, will eventually disappoint you. When left to their own devices, people lie and keep secrets and change and disappear, some behind a different face or personality, some behind a dense early morning fog, beyond a cliff.”

— Lauren Oliver

248. “I reach out and grab her wrist. It feels impossibly tiny in my hand, like this one time I found a baby bird near goose Point, and I picked it up and it died there, taking its final gasping fluttering breaths in my palm.”

— Lauren Oliver

249. “Alex loved books. He was the one who first introduced me to poetry. That’s another reason I can’t read anymore.”

— Lauren Oliver

250. “Is it possible to tell the truth in a society of lies? Or must you always, of necessity, become a liar?”

— Lauren Oliver