01c. 1982 ADIt was unfair that people could pretend to be one thing when they were really something else. That they would get you on their side and then do nothing but fail, and fail, and fail again. People should come with warnings, like cigarette packs: involvement would kill you over time.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
02c. 1982 ADIs it possible to tell the truth in a society of lies? Or must you always, of necessity, become a liar?And if you lie to a liar, is the sun somehow negated or reversed?Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
03c. 1982 ADEveryone you trust, everyone you think can count on, will eventually disappoint you. When left to their own devices, people lie and keep secrets and change and disappear…Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
07c. 1982 ADon the day that started it all, that rocketed me forward and landed me here, in this new body, in this new future.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
08c. 1982 ADI learned to swallow words back, hold secrets on my tongue until they dissolved like soap bubbles.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
09c. 1982 ADOnce you let in the word, once you allow it to take root, it will spread like a mold through all of your corners and dark spaces— and with it, the questions, the shivery, splintered fears, enough to keep you permanently awake.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
10c. 1982 ADThings weren’t always as good as they are now. In school we learned that in the old days, the dark days, people didn’t realize how deadly a disease love was.For a long time they even viewed it as a good thing, something to be celebrated and pursued. Of course that’s one of the reasons it’s so dangerous: It affects your mind so that you cannot think clearly, or make rational decisions about your own well-being. (That’s symptom number twelve, listed in the amor deliria nervosa section of the twelfth edition of The Safety, Health, and Happiness Handbook, or The Book of Shhh, as we call it.) Instead people back then named other diseases—stress, heart disease, anxiety, depression, hypertension, insomnia, bipolar disorder—never realizing that these were, in fact, only symptoms that in the majority of cases could be traced back to the effects of amor deliria nervosa.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
11c. 1982 ADLord, help us root our feet to the earthAnd our eyes to the roadAnd always remember the fallen angelsWho, attempting to soar,Were seared instead by the sun and, wings melting,Came crashing back to the sea.Lord, help root my eyes to the earthAnd stay my eyes to the roadSo I may never stLauren Oliver / quote ↗
12c. 1982 ADMaybe Lindsay and I are best friends and we hate each other, both. Maybe I’m only one math class away from being a slut like Anna Cartullo. Maybe I am like her, deep down. Maybe we all are: just one lunch period away from eating alone in the bathroom. 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 / quote ↗
13c. 1982 ADI start to follow her, and Alex grabs my hand."I'll find you," he says, watching me with the eyes I remember. "I won't let you go again."I don't trust myself to speak. Instead I nod, hoping that he understands me. He squeezes my hand."Go," he says.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
14c. 1982 ADGrief 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 / quote ↗
15c. 1982 ADFor a second, I feel a sense of overwhelming grief: for how things change, for the fact that we can never go back. I'm not certain of anything anymore. I don't know what will happen--Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
16c. 1982 ADI feel a flash of grief so intense it almost makes me cry out: not for what I lost, but for the chances I missed.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
17c. 1982 ADThat was what her parents did not understand—and had never understood—about stories. Liza told herself storied as though she was weaving and knotting an endless rope. Then, no matter how dark or terrible the pit she found herself in, she could pull herself out, inch by inch and hand over hand, on the long rope of stories.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
18c. 1982 ADA good friend keeps your secrets for you. A best friend helps you keep your own secrets.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
19c. 1982 ADIt struck her how sad it was that all of them had grown up on top of one another like small animals in a too-small cage, and now would simply scatter. And that would be the end of that. Everything that had happened would be sucked away into memory and vapour, as though it hadn't even happened at all.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
20c. 1982 ADMaybe 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 / quote ↗
21c. 1982 ADAnd 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 / quote ↗
22c. 1982 ADI guess we all have some of these - memories like artillery shells, fired at close range.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
23c. 1982 AD(I)f you do not believe that hearts can bloom suddenly bigger, and that love can open like a flower out of even the hardest places, then I am afraid that for you the road will be long and brown and barren, and you will have trouble finding theLauren Oliver / quote ↗
24c. 1982 ADThe alchemist was dazed and dumbfounded, as the true meaning of the magic was revealed: *The dead will rise from glade to glen and ancient will be young again*. The dead had, after all, risen. From dead and dry things there was growth, and new life everywhere. And the endlessly long winter had at last turned to spring. From life to death and back again to life. It was indeed the greatest magic in the world.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
