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I've been so used to thinking of what the borders are keeping out that I haven't considered that they're also penning us in.

Lauren Oliver

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Lauren Oliver
Age: 42
Born: 1982
Born: November 8
Author
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Westchester County
New York
Borders
Keeping
Considered
Havens
Haven
Also
Used
Thinking

More quotes by Lauren Oliver

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Grief is like sinking, like being buried.
Lauren Oliver
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Then I think of the dark, and the lights, and the roaring, and Juliet, and before I can think of anything else, I fight the final few steps to the door and step out into the cold, where the rain is still coming down like shards of moonlight, or like steel.
Lauren Oliver
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...and once at Hana's house, when we stole some blackberry liqueur from her parents' liquor cabinet and drank until the ceiling started spinning overhead. Hana was laughing and giggling, but I didn't like it, didn't like the sweet sick taste in my mouth or the way my thoughts seemed to break apart like a mist in the sun.
Lauren Oliver
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Maybe all of these different possibilities exist at the same time, like each moment we live has a thousand other moments layered underneath it that look different.
Lauren Oliver
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Most people don't want to be saved. Besides, if you keep bailing everybody out, they'll never learn to paddle on their own.
Lauren Oliver
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Alex is dead, do you hear me? All of that-what we felt, what it meant- that's done now, okay? Buried. Blown away.
Lauren Oliver
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That's all I want. Just you and me. Always.
Lauren Oliver
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only when it rains. and sometimes, too, when i remember.
Lauren Oliver
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amazingly, i'd actually forgotten that i'm supposed to be plain. i'm so used to alex telling me i'm beautiful. i'm so used to feeling beautiful around him. a hollow opens up in my chest. this is what life will be like without him: everything will become ordinary again. i'll become ordinary again.
Lauren Oliver
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Kent? I say, and my voice seems to have to rise from inside the fog, taking forever to get from my brain to my mouth. Yeah? Promise you'll stay here with me? I say. I promise, he whispers.
Lauren Oliver
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Quiet through the grave go I or else beneath the graves I lie
Lauren Oliver
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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.
Lauren Oliver
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I'm overwhelmed with sadness for everything that was lost, and filled with anger toward the people who took it away. My people-or at least, my old people. I don't know who I am anymore, or where I belong. That's not totally true...I know I belong with Alex.
Lauren Oliver
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That is what Alex is now: a shadow-boy
Lauren Oliver
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And when we are with Alex, I might as well not be there. They speak in a language of whispers and giggles and secrets their words are like a fairy-tale tangle of thorns, which place a wall between us.
Lauren Oliver
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I 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
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The question was: Will you meet me tomorrow? And the word was: Yes.
Lauren Oliver
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But the guilt goes even deeper than that. It, too, is dust: Layers and layers of it have accumulated. Because if it weren’t for me, Lena and Alex would never have been caught at all. I told on them. I was jealous. God forgive me, for I have sinned.
Lauren Oliver
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He is my world and my world is him and without him there is no world.
Lauren Oliver
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Perhaps this was how the sparrows did it too perhaps they were looking so hard at the peaks and tips of the new rooftops coated with dew, and the vast new horizon, that they only forgot that they did not know how to fly until they were already in midair.
Lauren Oliver