1,161 Quotes by Lauren Oliver

That’s when I realized that certain moments go on forever. Even after they’re over they still go on, even after you’re dead and buried, those moments are lasting still, backward and forward, on into infinity. They are everything and everywhere all at once. They are the meaning.

And for a moment – for a split second – everything else falls away, the whole pattern and order of my life, and a huge joy crests in my chest. I am no one, and I owe nothing to anybody, and my life is my own.

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.

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.

It’s funny how you can know your friends so well, but you still end up playing the same games with them.

Sometimes I’m afraid to go to sleep because of what I’m leaving behind.

My mother had soft hands that smelled like soap, and a smile like the first bit of sunlight creeping over a trimmed lawn.

There’s still always the possibility that I’ve gone totally, clinically cuckoo. But somehow I don’t think so anymore. An article I once read said that crazy people don’t worry about being crazy – that’s the whole problem.

But it’s not about knowing. It is simply about going forward. The cureds want to know; we have chosen faith instead.