Top 500 Lauren Oliver Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

303. “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

304. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

306. “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

307. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

309. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

317. “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

318. “He makes me feel like music.”

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

320. “Julian will go to the gallows for us, and we will smile, and dream of victory – hazy-red, soon to come, a blood-colored dawn.”

— Lauren Oliver

321. “My first kiss. A new kind of kiss, like the new kind of music still playing, softly, in the distance – wild and arrhythmic, desperate. Passionate.”

— Lauren Oliver

322. “She didn’t realize how much depends on what you’re remembered for. Sometimes, it’s so much better to be forgotten.”

— Lauren Oliver

323. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

325. “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

326. “I wonder whether she was sorry for leaving us behind.”

— Lauren Oliver

327. “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

328. “Maybe, the hope said. Maybe.”

— Lauren Oliver

329. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

339. “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

340. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

342. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

344. “Because if it weren’t for me, Lena and Alex would never have been caught at all. I told on them. I was jealous.”

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

346. “That was the problem with the outside world, the human world. The whole thing was made up puzzles, of a language she didn’t quite speak.”

— Lauren Oliver

347. “Here’s the last thing that occurs to me as Sarah recedes in the rearview mirror, slamming out of the car, jogging across the parking lot: If you’re one tardy away from missing out on a big competition, you should probably make your coffee at home.”

— Lauren Oliver

348. “When a heart breaks, a firefly is born.”

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver