1,161 Quotes by Lauren Oliver

She shrugs again. “You were unconscious when they brought you home,” she says matter-of-factly, as though this is a natural fact of life, or something I did— and not because a bunch of regulators clubbed me on the back of the head. That’s the irony of it. She’s looking at me like I’m the crazy one, the dangerous one. Meanwhile, the guy downstairs who nearly fractured my skull and bled my brains all over the pavement is the savior.

We are all punished for the lives we have chosen, in one way or another.

Every choice is limited. That's life.

At the same time I know that it’s not really their fault, at least not completely. I did my part too. I did it on a hundred different days and in a thousand different ways, and I know it. But this makes the anger worse, not better.

Here's one of the things I learned that morning: if you cross a line and nothing happens, the line loses meaning. It's like that old riddle about a tree falling in a forest, and whether it makes a sound if there's no one around to hear it. You keep drawing a line farther and farther away, crossing it every time. That's how people end up stepping off the edge of the earth.

It's amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast.

The details that are life's special pattern, like how in handwoven rugs what really makes them unique are the tiny flaws in the stitching, little gaps and jumps and stutters that can never be reproduced. so many things become beautiful when you really look.

This place has always existed: While cities were bombed and turned into ruins, while walls went up--the stream was here, running over the rocks, full of its own secret laughter.

Love will turn the whole world into something greater than itself.