Top 500 Lauren Oliver Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “I don’t love you, Lena. Do you hear me? I never love you.”

— Lauren Oliver

252. “But that’s the beauty of life: time is yours to keep and to change. Just a few minutes can be sufficient to carve a new road, a new track.”

— Lauren Oliver

253. “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

254. “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

255. “My heart is fluid and soaring. There’s no longer any space between heartbeats.”

— Lauren Oliver

256. “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

257. “There’s a metaphor in that somewhere – like all of life is about ending up somewhere you didn’t expect, and learning to just be happy with it.”

— Lauren Oliver

258. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

260. “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

261. “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

262. “There are some losses we never get over.”

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

264. “Beautiful,” and when his eyes meet mine I know that he really, truly means it.”

— Lauren Oliver

265. “I wonder if you fall forever and ever and never touch down, is it really still falling? I think I will fall forever.”

— Lauren Oliver

266. “But those are just words, and words are just stories, and eventually, always, stories come to an end.”

— Lauren Oliver

267. “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

268. “It’s like high school holds two different worlds, revolving around each other an never touching; the haves and the have-nots. I guess it’s a good thing. High school is supposed to prepare you for the real world, after all.”

— Lauren Oliver

269. “They say the cure is about happiness, but I understand now that it isn’t, and it never was. It’s about fear: fear of pain, fear of hurt, fear, fear, fear – a blind animal existence, bumping between walls, shuffling between ever-narrowing hallways, terrified and dull and stupid.”

— Lauren Oliver

270. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

272. “It’s Connecticut: being like the people around you is the whole point.”

— Lauren Oliver

273. “It’s like there’s a filter set up in my brain, except instead of making things better, it twists everything around so what comes out of my mouth is totally wrong, totally different from what I was thinking.”

— Lauren Oliver

274. “Memory is like that, too. We build careful bridges. But they’re weaker than we think.”

— Lauren Oliver

275. “Someday she will be saved, and the past and all its pain will be rendered as smoothly palatable as the food we spoon to our babies.”

— Lauren Oliver

276. “It is a ruined-world, a nonsense-place.”

— Lauren Oliver

277. “I need him to know that I came for him. I need him to know that somehow, at some point in the tunnels, I began to love him.”

— Lauren Oliver

278. “That’s the problem with lies. They aren’t solid. They melt, and seep, and leak into the truth. And sooner or later, everything’s just a muddle.”

— Lauren Oliver

279. “Shhh.”my mother said She presses her lips to my forehead, strokes my hair, just like she used to when I was a child. I am a baby once again in her arms – helpless and needy. “I’m here now.”

— Lauren Oliver

280. “For a second I feel a rush of sadness: for the horizons that vanish behind us, for the people we leave behind, the tiny-doll selves that get stored away and ultimately buried.”

— Lauren Oliver

281. “The world has nothing to offer me, no single shred of interest. I’m a woman trapped on a balcony, watching a passing parade, a blur of noise and motion that eventually turns to a single point on the horizon, a gutter full of trampled and muddy cups, and the sense of wasting an afternoon.”

— Lauren Oliver

282. “This is what hatred is. It will feed you and at the same time turn you to rot.”

— Lauren Oliver

283. “I put my forehead on his collarbone, place one hand on his chest. Its rhythm reassures me: He is real, and he is now.”

— Lauren Oliver

284. “Love is a kind of possession. It’s a poison.”

— Lauren Oliver

285. “I screamed until my voice dried up in my throat. We all did. All of us in Ward Six, all of us forgotten, left to rot.”

— Lauren Oliver

286. “And when we are with Alex, I might as well not be there. They speak in a language of whispers and giggles and secrets; their words are like a fairy-tale tangle of thorns, which place a wall between us.”

— Lauren Oliver

287. “I guess it’s the same way trees grow around the very vines that are killing them, so they’re strangled and sustained all at once. After a long time, even pain can be a comfort.”

— Lauren Oliver

288. “Perfection is a promise, and a reassurance that we are not wrong.”

— Lauren Oliver

289. “Funny how time heals. Like that bullet in my ribs. It’s there, I know it’s there, but I can barely feel it at all anymore.”

— Lauren Oliver

290. “I’m used to a feeling of doubleness, of thinking one thing and having to do another, a constant tug-of-war.”

— Lauren Oliver

291. “Even the greatest movements on earth, have their beginnings with something small.”

— Lauren Oliver

292. “I wish I could close my eyes and be blown into dust and nothingness, feel all my thoughts disperse like dandelion fluff drifting off on the wind.”

— Lauren Oliver

293. “Poetry isn’t like any writing I’ve ever heard before. I don’t understand all of it, just bits of images, sentences that appear half-finished, all fluttering together like brightly colored ribbons in the wind.”

— Lauren Oliver

294. “The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone. If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging at your back and running its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do is run.”

— Lauren Oliver

295. “Unhappiness is bondage; therefore, happiness is freedom.”

— Lauren Oliver

296. “But from the beginning, I knew that in a world where destiny was dead, I was destined, forever, to love him. Even though he didn’t – though he couldn’t – ever love me back.”

— Lauren Oliver

297. “But it does not tell you this: that love will turn the whole world into something greater than itself.”

— Lauren Oliver

298. “It’s for the best. But no matter how many times I repeat it, the strange, hollow feeling in my stomach doesn’t go away. And ridiculous as it is, I can’t shake the persistent, needling feeling that I’ve forgotten something, or missed something, or lost something forever.”

— Lauren Oliver

299. “A name that brings a taste of sunshine, and of sunshine raising mist from the trees, and of mist reaching toward the sky.”

— Lauren Oliver

300. “Maybe before you die, it’s your ghosts you see.”

— Lauren Oliver