Top 500 Lauren Oliver Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “Freedom is exhausting.”

— Lauren Oliver

402. “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

403. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

405. “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

406. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

408. “She’s like a person looking through the wrong end of a telescope, complaining that everything looks small.”

— Lauren Oliver

409. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

413. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

416. “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

417. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

420. “Maybe you can afford to wait. Maybe for you there’s a tomorrow. Maybe for you there’s one thousand tomorrows, or three thousand, or ten, so much time you can bathe in it, roll around it, let it slide like coins through you fingers. So much time you can waste it. But for some of us there’s only today. And the truth is, you never really know.”

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

422. “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

423. “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

424. “It’s like there’s a filter set up in my brain, except instead of making things better, it twists everything around so what comes out of my mouth is totally wrong, totally different from what I was thinking.”

— Lauren Oliver

425. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

427. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

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

— Lauren Oliver

433. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

436. “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

437. “Thing that don’t matter when you’ve lived the same day.”

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

439. “Mice? Fine. Flying mice? Not so fine.”

— Lauren Oliver

440. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

442. “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

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

— Lauren Oliver

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

— Lauren Oliver

445. “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

446. “That’s what Zombieland is: frozen, calm, quiet.”

— Lauren Oliver

447. “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

448. “Time and space recede and blast away like a universe expanding forever outward, and leaving only darkness and the two of us on its periphery, darkness and breathing and touch.”

— Lauren Oliver

449. “We stay like that for a long time, side by side, holding hands, until the crickets, obeying the same ancient law that pulls the sun from the sky and throws the moon up after it, that strips autumn down to winter and pushes spring up afterward, obeying the law of closure and new beginnings, send their voices up from the silence, and sing.”

— Lauren Oliver

450. “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