Top 500 Lauren Oliver Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “I feel as though I’m in a dream, where strange things are happening but they don’t feel strange. Everything is cloudy – everything is wrapped in a fog – and I’m filled from head to toe with the single, burning desire to get closer to the music, to hear the music better, for the music to go on and on and on.”

— Lauren Oliver

302. “He was still in love with you, anyway.”

— Lauren Oliver

303. “And it’s the funniest thing: as soon as I see it, the whistling in my ears stops and the feeling of terror drains away, and I realize this whole time I haven’t been falling at all. I’ve been floating.”

— Lauren Oliver

304. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

306. “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

307. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

309. “This is the language of the world before – a world of chaos and confusion and happiness and despair – before the blitz turned streets to grids, cities to prisons, and hearts to dust.”

— Lauren Oliver

310. “I start to back away before I do something wildly inappropriate, like jump on top of him.”

— Lauren Oliver

311. “I started to think about time, and how it keeps moving and draining and flowing forever forward, seconds into minutes into days into years, all of it leading to the same place, a current running forever in one direction. And we’re all going and swimming as fast as we can, helping it along.”

— Lauren Oliver

312. “I don’t understand how everything changes, how the layers of your life get buried. Impossible. At some point, at some time, we must all explode.”

— Lauren Oliver

313. “A string of bright white buildinh, glistening like teeth over the slurping mouth of the ocean.”

— Lauren Oliver

314. “I suppose, in some sense, wills are like maps: they are the imprint we leave, the places our affections have been entrenched; the work we have done; the money we have burrowed away; the furrows and the paths that lead back to spaces we have gone, and marked, and loved.”

— Lauren Oliver

315. “This is what hatred is. It will feed you and at the same time turn you to rot. It is hard and deep and angular, a system of blockades. It is everything and total. Hatred is a high tower. In the Wilds, I start to build, and to climb.”

— Lauren Oliver

316. “I need to live my life in the light of their deaths. I need to live.”

— Lauren Oliver

317. “Let me tell you something about dying: it’s not as bad as they says. it’s the coming-back-to-life part that hurts.”

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

320. “I learned to swallow words back, hold secrets on my tongue until they dissolved like soap bubbles.”

— Lauren Oliver

321. “Sometimes I feel like she deserves a best friend who is just a little more special.”

— Lauren Oliver

322. “There is only what you want and what happens. There is only grabbing on and holding tight in the darkness.”

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

328. “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

329. “He makes me feel like music.”

— Lauren Oliver

330. “If singing were a feeling it would be this, this light, this lifting, like laughing...”

— Lauren Oliver

331. “They told us that love was a disease. They told us it would kill us in the end.”

— Lauren Oliver

332. “Love obeys no laws other than its own. That’s what always made it frightening.”

— Lauren Oliver

333. “If secrets were stuffing, the woman would be done up like a Thanksgiving turkey.”

— Lauren Oliver

334. “That thing – the heart of hearts of me, the core of my core – stretches and unfurls even further, soaring like a flag: making me feel stronger than I ever have before. I.”

— Lauren Oliver

335. “Y todo me parece absurdo, arbitrario. Una se eleva y la otra cae en picado: pura casualidad, un capricho del azar. Todo se reduce a estar en el momento y el lugar adecuados, o no estarlo.”

— Lauren Oliver

336. “Maybe, the hope said. Maybe.”

— Lauren Oliver

337. “Popularity’s a weird thing. You can’t really define it, and it’s not cool to talk about, but you know it when you see it. Like a lazy eye, or porn.”

— Lauren Oliver

338. “There was always a way up, and out, and no need to be afraid.”

— Lauren Oliver

339. “It’s funny how you can know your friends so well, but you still end up playing the same games with them.”

— Lauren Oliver

340. “Things change after you die, though, I guess because dying is the loneliest thing you can do.”

— Lauren Oliver

341. “At the same time I know that it’s not really their fault, at least not completely. I did my part too. I did it on a hundred different days and in a thousand different ways, and I know it. But this makes the anger worse, not better.”

— Lauren Oliver

342. “Grief is like sinking, like being buried. I am in water the tawny color of kicked-up dirt. Every breath is full of choking. There is nothing to hold on to, no sides, no way to claw myself up. There is nothing to do but let go. Let go. Feel the weight all around you, feel the squeezing of your lungs, the slow, low pressure. Let yourself go deeper. There is nothing but bottom. There is nothing but the taste of metal, and the echoes of old things, and days that look like darkness.”

— Lauren Oliver

343. “This is how we grow: not up, but out, like trees – swelling to encompass all these stories, the promises and lies and bribes and habits.”

— Lauren Oliver

344. “We’re killers, all of us: We kill our lives, our past selves, the things that mattered. We bury them under slogans and excuses.”

— Lauren Oliver

345. “Walking into parties always gives me a crampy feeling at the bottom of my stomach. Its a good feeling though: The feeling of knowing anything can happen. Most of the time nothing does, of course. Most of the time one night blends into the next, and weeks blend into weeks, and months into other months. And sooner or later we die.”

— Lauren Oliver

346. “Unhappiness is bondage; therefore, happiness is freedom. The way to find happiness is through the cure. Therefore, it is only through the cure that one finds freedom.”

— Lauren Oliver

347. “Old words; words that nearly brought me to my knees. Live free or die.”

— Lauren Oliver

348. “The idea – the fact of it, the fact that he even noticed and thought about me for more than one second – is huge and overwhelming, makes my legs go tingly and my hands feel numb.”

— Lauren Oliver

349. “Perfect. There’s the word again: a locked-door word – stifling, strangling.”

— Lauren Oliver

350. “My parents were pretty liberal, but they were still parents. I definitely had my teenage rebellion.”

— Lauren Oliver