Top 500 Lauren Oliver Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

411. “Freedom is exhausting.”

— Lauren Oliver

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

416. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

431. “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

432. “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

433. “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

434. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

438. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

440. “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

441. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

443. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

445. “I will make a pact with you: I will do it if you will do it, always and forever. Take down the walls.”

— Lauren Oliver

446. “And in that moment, the wordless thing passed between us, the thing that wasn’t quite love but was so close I could believe in it sometimes.”

— Lauren Oliver

447. “But it’s not about knowing. It is simply about going forward.”

— Lauren Oliver

448. “You may never know Hell, but you will not find Heaven, either.”

— Lauren Oliver

449. “But if you do believe, then you already know all about magic.”

— Lauren Oliver

450. “It was as though the darkness was a sheet of raw cookie dough and someone had just taken a cookie cutter and made a child-sized shape out of it.”

— Lauren Oliver