Top 50+ Lauren Oliver Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “She’s like a person looking through the wrong end of a telescope, complaining that everything looks small.”

— Lauren Oliver

352. “I don’t know which is worse: that I’m home and so much is different, or that I’m home and so much feels the same.”

— Lauren Oliver

353. “We are all Hangmen.”

— Lauren Oliver

354. “Time jumps. It leaps. It pours away like water through fingers.”

— Lauren Oliver

355. “In approved places, every story serves a purpose. But forbidden books are so much more. Some of them are webs; you can feel your way along their threads, but just barely, into strange and dark corners. Some of them are balloons bobbing up through the sky: totally self-contained, and unreachable, but beautiful to watch. And some of them – the best ones – are doors.”

— Lauren Oliver

356. “Kiss Kent. Really kiss him, slow and long, somewhere outside – maybe while it’s snowing. Maybe standing in the woods. He’ll lean forward and he’ll have little snowflakes on his eyelashes again and he’ll brush the hair away from my face and put a warm hand behind my neck, so warm it’s almost burning –.”

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

358. “You should only fall in love with people who will fall in love with you back.”

— Lauren Oliver

359. “The salt blowing off the sea makes the air feel textured and heavy.”

— Lauren Oliver

360. “Once Mo had closed the gates, he returned to his little stone hut, and his half-eaten sandwich of butter and canned sardines, and his mug of thick hot chocolate, which every night he poured carefully into a thermos labeled COFFEE.”

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

362. “In the lower half of one wall, she has traced the word so many times in such enormous script – LOVE, each letter the size of a child – and gouged so deeply into the stone that the O has formed a tunnel, and she has gotten out.”

— Lauren Oliver

363. “I wonder if this is how people get close: They heal each other’s wounds.”

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

365. “I was the one who was really buried that day.”

— Lauren Oliver

366. “Birds feed; then they nest. Paint them any color you want, send them halfway around the world, but they’ll always find a way back. And eventually they’ll show their true colors again.”

— Lauren Oliver

367. “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

368. “Parents teach us our very first lesson about love: that you sure as hell don’t get to choose it.”

— Lauren Oliver

369. “That’s modernity, if you ask me: endless division.”

— Lauren Oliver

370. “What was the point of trying at all, if in the end you were no better, no longer, no more real than a bathroom sink and a rust stain?”

— Lauren Oliver

371. “Above our heads, the stars flare and glitter and flash: thousands and thousands of them, so many thousands they look like snowflakes whirling away into the inky dark.”

— Lauren Oliver

372. “Funny how people could be around you for so many years, and be so off the mark.”

— Lauren Oliver

373. “This is not the person I wanted to become: Hatred has carved a permanent place inside me, a hollow where things are so easily lost.”

— Lauren Oliver

374. “The memories seem like snapshots from someone else’s life.”

— Lauren Oliver

375. “I close my eyes. An image flashes – emerging from the van with Julian after our escape from New York City; believing, in that moment, that we had escaped the worst, that life would begin again for us. Instead life has only grown harder.”

— Lauren Oliver

376. “Each step is more difficult than the last; the heaviness fills me and turns my limbs to stone. You must hurt or be hurt.”

— Lauren Oliver

377. “I used to think that’s what love was: knowing someone so well he was like a part of you.”

— Lauren Oliver

378. “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

379. “You can’t tell me what to feel.”

— Lauren Oliver

380. “It’s a miracle I was able to get out of the house today. It’s a miracle I’m even wearing pants, a double miracle I remembered to wear shoes.”

— Lauren Oliver

381. “Decaf. The single worst word in the English language.”

— Lauren Oliver

382. “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

383. “Fear. Blame. Don’t forget. Mom. I love you. -Lauren Oliver, Delerium.”

— Lauren Oliver

384. “And yet there were times when I felt my life full of such richness, such fullness, I couldn’t express it, couldn’t speak or breathe a word because I feared the disruption – even a single breath could ruin it, like wind over a pond. I didn’t want even a ripple.”

— Lauren Oliver

385. “Days pass, time ticks away, seconds click forward like dominoes toppling in a line.”

— Lauren Oliver

386. “I remember something Mrs. Harbor once said on one of her crazy tangents in English: that Plato believed that the whole world – everything we can see – was just like shadows on a cave wall. We can’t actually see the real thing, the thing that’s casting the shadow in the first place.”

— Lauren Oliver

387. “But I am going to keep going. I am going to soar, and soar, and break away – up, up, up into the thundering noise and the wind, like a bird being sucked into the sky.”

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

389. “But this isn’t like anything I’ve ever seen, or imagined, or even dreamed: This is like music or dancing but better than both.”

— Lauren Oliver

390. “In books, secret worlds are accessible by doors or keys or other physical objects. But Lovelorn was not such a world, and appeared at whim and only when it felt like it, with a subtle change like the slow shifting of afternoon to evening.”

— Lauren Oliver

391. “People do terrible things, sometimes, for the best reasons. “What’s.”

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

393. “And when I wake up it’s wonderful, like I’ve been carried quietly onto a calm, peaceful shore, and the dream, and its meaning, has broken over me like a wave and is ebbing away now, leaving me with a single, solid certainty. I know now.”

— Lauren Oliver

394. “Fred is officially the mayor of Portland now.”

— Lauren Oliver

395. “I let her stay a few feet ahead of me and try to memorize her exactly as she is: running, laughing, tan and happy and beautiful and mine; blond hair flashing in the last rays of sun like a torch, like a beacon of good things to come, and better days ahead for us both.”

— Lauren Oliver

396. “Sometimes it is necessary that individuals are sacrificed for the the health of the whole.”

— Lauren Oliver

397. “It is war now, and armies need symbols.”

— Lauren Oliver

398. “I haven’t been falling all this time. I’ve been flying.”

— Lauren Oliver

399. “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

400. “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