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That is the rule of the Wilds: You must be bigger and stronger and tougher. You must hurt or be hurt.

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
Must
Wilds
Tougher
Rule
Stronger
Bigger
Hurt
Strong

More quotes by Lauren Oliver

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Droplets, droplets: we are all identical drips and drops of people, hovering, waiting to be tipped, waiting for someone to show us the way, to pour us down a path.
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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Love, the deadliest of all things: It kills you both when you have it and when you don't. But that isn't it, exactly. The condemner and the condemned. The executioner the blade the last-minute reprieve the gasping breath and the rolling sky above you and the thank you, thank you, thank you God. Love: It will kill you and save you, both.
Lauren Oliver
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It's an incredible thing, how you can feel so taken care of by someone and yet feel, also, like you would die or do anything just for the chance to protect him back.
Lauren Oliver
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Like I've been sketched by an amateur artist: if you don't look too closely, it's all right, but start focusing and all the smudges and mistakes become really obvious.
Lauren Oliver
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Even the greatest movements on earth, have their beginnings with something small.
Lauren Oliver
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That’s just the kind of thing that kids do to each other. It’s no big deal. There’s always going to be a person laughing and somebody getting laughed at. It happens every day, in every school, in every town in America—probably in the world, for all I know. The whole point of growing up is learning to stay on the laughing side.
Lauren Oliver
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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
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My first kiss. A new kind of kiss, like the new kind of music still playing, softly, in the distance - wild and arrhythmic, desperate. Passionate.
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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Let me tell you something about dying: it's not as bad as they says. it's the coming-back-to-life part that hurts.
Lauren Oliver
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I love you. They can't take it away.
Lauren Oliver
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I wonder if this is how people always get close: They heal each other's wounds they repair the broken skin.
Lauren Oliver
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I know the past will drag you backward and down, have you snatching at whispers of wind and the gibberish of trees rubbing together, trying to decipher some code, trying to piece together what was broken. It's hopeless. The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside you like a stone.
Lauren Oliver
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Sometimes I'm afraid to go to sleep because of what I'm leaving behind.
Lauren Oliver
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That 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
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And you should hear the music. Incredible, amazing music, like nothing you've ever heard, music that almost takes your head off, you know? That makes you want to scream and jump up and down and break stuff and cry.
Lauren Oliver
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I have had to give up so much, so many selves and lives already. I have grown up and out of the rubble of my old lives, of things and people I have cared for.
Lauren Oliver
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People could push and pull at you, and poke you, and probe as deep as they could go. They could even tear you apart, bit by bit. But at the heart and root and soul of you, something would remain untouched.
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