Top 500 Lauren Oliver Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “When I got home, my roof was gone. Overnight the weight of the snow became too much to carry. What tipped the scale? Think about it: there must have been a final snowflake that did it, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a milligram that made all the difference.”

— Lauren Oliver

402. “But all you see is the crap. So you don’t have to believe in anything. So you’ll have an excuse to fail.”

— Lauren Oliver

403. “I’ve always hated being looked at.”

— Lauren Oliver

404. “I have Lena back again, but she is changed, and it seems that every day she grows a little more different, a little more distant, as though I am watching her walk down a darkening hallway.”

— Lauren Oliver

405. “What did Saturday’s used to taste like? Like eggs and fried ham and the bitter smell of hair in heavy rollers. Like long quiet hours and making up after a fight. Like ointment and bruising. Like waiting, especially, for something – anything – to happen.”

— Lauren Oliver

406. “Her eyes are shining; she’s excited now, ready to go. For a moment, standing in the fuzzy haze of sunlight still penetrating the blinds, she appears to be glowing, as though lit up by some internal flame. And now I know why they invented words for love, why they had to: It’s the only thing that can come close to describing what I feel in that moment, the baffling mixture of pain and pleasure and fear and joy, all running sharply through me at once.”

— Lauren Oliver

407. “Amazing how hope lives. Without air or water, with hardly anything at all to nurture it.”

— Lauren Oliver

408. “Mistake, mistake, mistake. A strange word: stinging, somehow.”

— Lauren Oliver

409. “As if they each belonged two separate realities that only coexisted momentarily.”

— Lauren Oliver

410. “I know the past will drag you backward and down, have you snatching at whispers of wind and the gibberish of trees rubbing together, trying to decipher some code, trying to piece together what was broken. It’s hopeless. The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside you like a stone.”

— Lauren Oliver

411. “This is what I want. This is the only thing I’ve ever wanted. Everything else – every single second of every single day that has come before this very moment, this kiss – has meant nothing.”

— Lauren Oliver

412. “We no longer pay attention to the clocks. Why should we? Noon is the taste of sawdust, and the feel of a splinter under a nail. Morning is mud and crumbling caulk. Evening is the smell of cooked tomatoes and mildew. And night is shivering, and the feel of mice sniffing around our skin.”

— Lauren Oliver

413. “And you should hear the music. Incredible, amazing music, like nothing you’ve ever heard, music that almost takes your head off, you know? That makes you want to scream and jump up and down and break stuff and cry...”

— Lauren Oliver

414. “At a certain point your brain stops to rationalize things. At a certain point it gives up, shuts off, shuts down.”

— Lauren Oliver

415. “Somewhere in the endless spinning of eternity that one, tiny, fraction of a second where our lips met is lost forever.”

— Lauren Oliver

416. “She liked that word: we. It sounded warm and open, like a hug.”

— Lauren Oliver

417. “I still wanted to know why. As though somebody was going to answer that for me, as though any answer would be satisfying.”

— Lauren Oliver

418. “You have to learn that people are always listening.”

— Lauren Oliver

419. “We stand there for a moment, looking at each other, and in that instant I feel our connection so strongly it’s as though it achieves physical existence, becomes a hand all around us, cupping us together, protecting us. This is what people are always talking about when they talk about god: this feeling, of being held and understood and protected. feeling this way seems about as close to saying a prayer as you could get...”

— Lauren Oliver

420. “She had never seen snow before, except in TV shows and movies. It had looked to her like the stars were flaking out of the sky. It had looked like thousands of fireflies in the moonlight; like breathlessness, like time stopping, like the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.”

— Lauren Oliver

421. “If you want something, if you take it for your own, you’ll always be taking it from someone else.”

— Lauren Oliver

422. “She knew that there were electrical currents in the body and was what she was reminded of now. of currents flowing between them, of thousands of lights.”

— Lauren Oliver

423. “They’d already taken her from me once. I didn’t want to lose her again.”

— Lauren Oliver

424. “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 all die. But at the beginning of the night anything’s possible.”

— Lauren Oliver

425. “For a split second, he had looked almost like my Alex again.”

— Lauren Oliver

426. “Happiness is found when no one is looking.”

— Lauren Oliver

427. “All I can think is: I need air. The rest of my thoughts are a blur of radio static and fluorescent lights and lab coats and steel tables and surgical knives.”

— Lauren Oliver

428. “Finishing books – and leaving the world you’ve created – is always a kind of emotionally wrenching experience. I usually cry.”

— Lauren Oliver

429. “School is only hard when you care about doing well. And when you’re the stupid one in the family, no one expects you to do well.”

— Lauren Oliver

430. “I wonder if it’s ever really possible to know the truth about someone else, or if the best we can do is just stumble into each other, heads down, hoping to avoid collision.”

— Lauren Oliver

431. “He looked at me like I was beautiful.”

— Lauren Oliver

432. “That’s what time does: We stand stubbornly like rocks while it flows all around us, believing that we are immutable – and all the time we’re being carved, and shaped, and whittled away.”

— Lauren Oliver

433. “Things That Don’t Matter When You’ve Lived the Same Day Six Times and Died on at Least Two of Them: Lunch meats and their relative coolness.”

— Lauren Oliver

434. “Just listen, okay?” He grabs my shoulders before I can move past him, and I know, I know that something huge is happening, the kind of thing that takes worlds apart and remakes them. Hurricanes and tornadoes and boys with blue eyes.”

— Lauren Oliver

435. “He’s furious. And something else – another expression is working beneath the anger, a look of hurt so deep it makes me want to curl up and die. It’s crazy how someone else’s pain can do that, just take the legs out from under you” -Mia.”

— Lauren Oliver

436. “I’ve relived that moment so often in my head, I can never be sure what really happened and what we only embellished afterward. But does it matter? We make reality our own, handle it until it is as soft as pressed butter.”

— Lauren Oliver

437. “As we’re standing there I realize we’re almost exactly the same height. We must look like the dark and light side of an Oreo cookie, and I think how just as easily it could have been the other way around. She could be blocking my path; I could be trying to slip around her into the dark.”

— Lauren Oliver

438. “The little scuzzbucket should just marry his right hand and be done with it.”

— Lauren Oliver

439. “Things would get difficult again. But that was okay too. The bravery was in moving forward, no matter what.”

— Lauren Oliver

440. “I was glad when the invalids were executed.”

— Lauren Oliver

441. “We can never understand. We can only try, fumbling our way through the tunneled places, reaching for light.”

— Lauren Oliver

442. “Freedom is exhausting.”

— Lauren Oliver

443. “Nothing has ever been so painful or delicious as being so close to him and being unable to do anything about it: like eating ice cream so fast on a hot day you get a splitting headache.”

— Lauren Oliver

444. “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

445. “People need other people to feel things for them,” she said. “It gets lonely to feel things all by yourself.”

— Lauren Oliver

446. “This is pretty much the answer to every problem you encounter in suburbia: plant a tree, and hope you don’t see anyone’s privates.”

— Lauren Oliver

447. “There is so much fragility in kissing, in other people: It is all glass.”

— Lauren Oliver

448. “It’s much better this way,” he said. “Change is just another word for disappointment, you know.”

— Lauren Oliver

449. “He gives my hand a quick squeeze, surprising me- there are somethings, I guess, that come naturally, even if you’ve never done them before.”

— Lauren Oliver

450. “The old Lena is dead,” I say, and then push past him, back down through the gully toward the camp. Each step is more difficult than the last; the heaviness fills me and turns my limbs to stone. You must hurt, or be hurt. Alex.”

— Lauren Oliver