Lauren Oliver Quotes

I wouldn't change a single thing, because one change alters every moment that follows it.

I keep telling you the future isn't set in stone. It's not all decided yet. The future is just what's down the road we decided to walk on today. You can change roads anytime. And that changes where you end up.

If you could go back and change things, you might not be the person you are right now.

The individual always realizes only one of the possibilities in its development, which could always have taken a different turning whenever it has to make an important decision.

Life is full of what-ifs, many of which could easily have been realities, had just a few things been different.

It's very easy to make certain decisions that affect your life that you have no perspective on.

Great breakthroughs are always followed by great catastrophes.

Nothing is ever guaranteed, and all that came before doesn't predicate what you might do next.

History is the unfolding of miscalculations

The future is fluid. Each act, each decision, and each development creates new possibilities and eliminates others. The future is ours to direct.

Ramifications of small decisions can be pretty large.

When the movie 'Sliding Doors' came out, it almost sent me into existential crisis because I think about that all the time. Like, 'Wait. If I left my house five minutes later, maybe this would have happened and I'd be on this different track of my life. How would that affect me?'

There is no action of man in this life that is not the beginning of so long a chain of consequences as no human providence is high enough to give a man a prospect in the end. And in this chain, there are linked together both pleasing and unpleasing events in such manner as he that will do anything for his pleasure must engage himself to suffer all the pains annexed to it.

Whenever you made a choice, especially one you'd been resisting, it always affected everything else, some in big ways, like a tremor beneath your feet, others in so tiny a shift you hardly noticed a change at all. But it was happening.

Every great decision creates ripples. Like a huge boulder dropping in a lake. The ripples merge and rebound off the banks in unforseeable ways. The heavier the decision, the larger the waves, the more uncertain the consequences.

If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can't know better until knowing better is useless.

None of us ever know all the possible courses our lives could have and maybe should have taken. It's probably just as well. Some secrets are meant to stay secret forever. Just ask Pandora.

You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act.

A tiny change today brings us to a dramatically different tomorrow. There are grand rewards for those who pick the high hard roads, but those rewards are hidden by years. Every choice is made in the uncaring blind, no guarantees from the world around us.

We were making the future and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it is!

Even if we could turn back, we'd probably never end up where we started.

The tragic evils of our life are so commonly unintentional. We did not start out for that poor, cheap goal. That aim was not in our minds at all....Look to the road you are walking on. He who picks up one end of [a] stick picks up the other.He who chooses the beginning of a road chooses the place it leads to.

When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don't take are snuffed out like candles, as if they'd never existed. At that moment all Will's choices existed at once. But to keep them all in existence meant doing nothing. He had to choose, after all.

Everything can always be different!

One of the persistent ironies of reform is the impossibility of predicting the full consequences of change.