Top 500 Lauren Oliver Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “Maybe for you there’s one thousand tomorrow’s, or three thousand, or ten, so much time you can bathe in it, roll around in it, let it slide like coins through your fingers.”

— Lauren Oliver

253. “You must hurt, or be hurt.”

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

257. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

283. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

292. “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

293. “We are all punished for the lives we have chosen, in one way or another.”

— Lauren Oliver

294. “Funny how certain things stay with you.”

— Lauren Oliver

295. “Magnetism, my chem teacher would call it. The seeking for a thing of its pair.”

— Lauren Oliver

296. “And then, just at that moment, when I’m no longer sure if I’m dreaming or awake or walking some valley in between where everything you wish for comes true, I feel the flutter of his lips on mine.”

— Lauren Oliver

297. “Now, after so many years, I understand what the Coldness was and where it came from – this sense that everything is lost, and worthless, and meaningless.”

— Lauren Oliver

298. “Everyone just wasting time because they have so much of it to waste, minutes slipping by on who’s with who and did you hear.”

— Lauren Oliver

299. “I didn’t realize then what a privilege that was: to be bored with your best friend; to have time to waste.”

— Lauren Oliver

300. “It is a strange phrase, ‘falling in love,’” said one of the princesses in the tower. Tears stood out on her cheeks, and even these were pretty, reflecting the blue sky above her. “It sounds like something you do accidentally, by yourself. But isn’t someone else always to blame? They should call it strangling in love. Walloped in love. Knocked-out-of-nowhere in love.”

— Lauren Oliver