01c. 1982 ADAnger is useful only to a certain point. After that, it becomes rage, and rage will make you careless.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
02c. 1982 ADBecause I am terrified by what I want: for him, and worst of all, from him. Because I do want. I'm not even sure what, exactly, but the want is there, just like the hate and anger were there before. But this is not a tower. It is an endless, tunneling pit; it drives deep, and opens a hole inside me.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
04c. 1982 ADRunning is a mental sport, more than anything else. You're only as good as your training, and your training is only as good as your thinking.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
05c. 1982 ADNot gray, exactly. Right before the sun rises there's a moment when the whole sky goes this pale nothing color-not really gray but sort of, or sort of white, and I've always really liked it because it reminds me of waiting for something good to happen.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
06c. 1982 ADI keep having the urge to cross my hands over my chest, to cover up my breasts, to hide. I'm suddenly aware of how pale I look in the sunshine, and how many moles I have spotting up and down my chest, and I just know he's looking at me thinking i'm wrong or deformed. But the he breathes, 'Beautiful' and when his eyes meet mine I know that he really, truly means it.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
07c. 1982 ADSee?” my mother would say, smiling at me and my sister, Carol, in turn. “We live in the greatest country on earth. See how lucky we are?”And yet the ash continued swirling down, and the smells of death came through the windows, crept under the door, hung in our carpets and curtains, and screamed of her lie.Is 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 sin somehow negated or reversed?These are the kinds of questions I ask myself now: in these dark, watery hours, when night and day are interchangeable. No. Not true.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
08c. 1982 ADIt's the rule of the wilds. You must be bigger, and stronger, and tougher. A coldness radiates through me, a solid wall that is growing, piece by piece, in my chest. He doesn't love me.He never loved me.It was all a lie."The old Lena is dead." I say, and then push past him. 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 / quote ↗
09c. 1982 ADEveryone is asleep. They've all been asleep for years. You seemed ... awake.' Alex is whispering now. He closes his eyes, opens them again.'I'm tired of sleeping.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
10c. 1982 ADPlease understand. Please forgive me.I prayed every day for you to be alive, until hope became painful.Don't hate me.I still love you.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
11c. 1982 ADUp and down, up and down, a ladder of choices leading to the next choice, and the next, until suddenly you've run out of choices, and ladder, and you find time as rare and thin as air on a mountain. Then it's oops, sorry, turn's over.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
12c. 1982 ADHe believed in people. He believed that if people could only be shown the right way-the way to health and order, a way to be free of unhappiness-they would make the right choice. They would obey.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
13c. 1982 ADThis was progress. This was modernity: you could cover over the past completely. You could bury the old under a relentless surface of new, stretched from corner to corner.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
14c. 1982 ADLove will turn the whole world into something greater than itself.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
15c. 1982 ADThat is the rule of the Wilds: You must be bigger and stronger and tougher. You must hurt or be hurt.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
16c. 1982 ADBut those are just words, and words are just stories, and eventually, always, stories come to an end.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
17c. 1982 ADYou can’t go home again” ─ isn’t necessarily that places change but people do.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
18c. 1982 ADI don't know which is worse: that I'm home and so much is different, or that I'm home and so much feels the same.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
19c. 1982 ADThe butterflies are working their way up from my stomach into my head, making me feel dizzy, and I try to calm myself by imagining the ocean outside, its ragged breathing, the seagulls turning pinwheels in the sky.It will be over soon, I tell myself. It will be over soon and then you’ll go home, and you’ll never have to think about the evaluation again.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
20c. 1982 ADWe are all punished for the lives we have chosen, in one way or another.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
21c. 1982 ADRaven looks at me. “What about you, Lena?”I can feel Alex’s eyes on me. My mouth is so dry; the sun is so blinding. I look away, toward the hundreds and hundreds of people who have been driven out of their homes, out of their lives, to this place of dust and dirtiness, all because they wanted the power to feel, to think, to choose for themselves. They couldn’t have known that even this was a lie—that we never really choose, not entirely. We are always being pushed and squeezed down one road or another. We have no choice but to step forward, and then step forward again, and then step forward again; suddenly we find ourselves on a road we haven’t chosen at all.But maybe happiness isn’t in the choosing. Maybe it’s in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.Coral shifts, and moves her hand to Alex’s arm.“I’m with Julian,” I say at last. This, after all, is what I have chosen.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
23c. 1982 ADI vowed after that day that I would be your hero too, no matter how long it tookLauren Oliver / quote ↗
24c. 1982 ADAnd then, just at that moment, when I'm no longer sure if I'm dreaming or awake or walking some valley in between where everything you wish for comes true, I feel the flutter of his lips on mine.Lauren Oliver / quote ↗
