Top 500 Lauren Oliver Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “We are all Hangmen.”

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

405. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

409. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

411. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

414. “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

415. “Coincidences; mix-ups; harmless mistakes and switches. And so a story is born.”

— Lauren Oliver

416. “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

417. “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

418. “Freedom is exhausting.”

— Lauren Oliver

419. “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

Featured in: Romance Quotes

420. “But that’s the beauty of life: time if yours to keep and to change. Just a few minutes can be sufficient to carve a new road, a new track. Just a few minutes, and the void is kept at bay. You will live forever with that new road inside of you, stretching away to a place suggested, barely, on the horizon. For the shortest time, shorter than the shortest second’s breath, you get to stand up to infinity. But eventually, and always, infinity wins.”

— Lauren Oliver

421. “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

Featured in: Romance Quotes

422. “But it was true she had never hurt anyone to get what she wanted. Was that what made her less than human?”

— Lauren Oliver

423. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

427. “Are you sure that being like everybody else will make you happy?”

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

429. “When I can no longer go forward, even by an inch, I lay my head on the ground and wait to die. I’m too tired to be frightened. Above me is blackness, and all around me is blackness, and the forest sounds are a symphony to sing me out of this world. I am already at my funeral.”

— Lauren Oliver

430. “It’s as though the words are trapped, buried under past fears, past lives, like fossils compressed under layers of dirt.”

— Lauren Oliver

431. “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

432. “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

433. “Juliet!? I whip around but not quickly enough. She’s swallowed by the crowd, the gap that allowed her to break for the door closing just as quickly as it opened, a shifting Tetris pattern of bodies...”

— 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. “When you can’t count on anything else, you can count on the news to make you sick.”

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

438. “That’s what you do for family. Anything.”

— Lauren Oliver

439. “Hunky Heroes, rescuing distressed women, captive princesses, and girls without wheels since 1684. p. 450.”

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

441. “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

442. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

444. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

446. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

448. “The worst is knowing I can’t tell anybody what’s happening -or what’s happened- to me. Not even my mom.”

— Lauren Oliver

449. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver