Top 500 Lauren Oliver Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “The rest you have to find out for yourself.”

— Lauren Oliver

202. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

208. “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

209. “So we’re different. Who cares? We chose to escape together. We chose to stay together. We chose each other, didn’t we?”

— Lauren Oliver

210. “The kidnapping, the kiss. I brought him here, after all. I rescue him an pulled him into this new life, a life of freedom and feeling.”

— Lauren Oliver

211. “Grief is like sinking, like being buried.”

— Lauren Oliver

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

219. “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.”

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

221. “Huamns, uregulated, are cruel and capricious; violet and selfish; miserable and quarrelsome. It is only after their instincts and basic emotions have been controlled that they can be happy, generous, and good.”

— Lauren Oliver

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

226. “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.”

— Lauren Oliver

227. “If you’re smart, you care. And if you care, you love.”

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

231. “Waste today, want tomorrow...”

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

233. “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

234. “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

235. “That is the rule of the Wilds: You must be bigger and stronger and tougher. You must hurt or be hurt.”

— Lauren Oliver

Featured in: Strong Quotes

236. “That’s my favorite thing about him. I like to lie next to him when it’s late, dark, and so quiet I can hear my own heartbeat. It’s times like that when I’m sure that I’m in love.”

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

238. “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

239. “Eyes the color of a dawn sky, a crown of blond hair, so bright and white and blinding I could swear it was a halo.”

— Lauren Oliver

240. “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

241. “You must hurt, or be hurt.”

— Lauren Oliver

242. “Lyra and Caelum: the two replicas with names plucked straight from the stars.”

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

245. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

247. “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

248. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

250. “As I lie there with the hurt driving through my chest and the sick, anxious feeling churning through me and the desire for Alex so strong inside of me 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