Lauren Oliver Quotes

Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees ... one's happiness, one's reality?

The place was a familiar as breath but as far from his life now as the moon.

I missed him, of course, but sometimes close friendships have a tidal beat that pulls you towards different shores though the ocean that connects you remains.

People grow apart, and sometimes, there nothing anyone can do about it.

And here I am, instead of there. I'm sitting in this library, thousands of miles from my life, writing another letter I know I won't be able to send, no matter how hard I try and how much I want to. How did that boy making love behind that shed become this man writing this letter at this table?

I do miss England. Well, I miss the idea of England, I think. But I haven't been back for years. I probably just miss the past.

Twenty years is, after all, a long time. We are not the same people we were. Old friends, lovers, even family members: they are strangers who happen to wear a familiar face. We have no right to claim to know anyone after such a distance.

What do we leave behind when we cross each frontier? Each moment seems split in two: melancholy for what was left behind and the excitement of entering a new land.

We did not touch each other. We were both leaning over the abyss.

I want to visit Memory Lane, I don't want to live there.

The past is a candle at great distance: too close to let you quit, too far to comfort you.

Absence becomes the greatest Presence.

Cassandra wondered at the mind's cruel ability to toss up flecks of the past. Why, as she neared her life's end, her grandmother's head should ring with the voices of people long since gone. Was it always this way? Did those with passage booked on death's silent ship always scan the dock for faces of the long-departed?

You said you're going far away," Tamaru said. "How far away are we talking about?" "It's a distance that can't be measured." "Like the distance that separates one person's heart from another's.

Intimacy is not trapped within words. It passes through words. It passes. The truth is that intimates leave the room. Doors close. Faces move away from the window. Time passes. Voices recede into the dark. Death finally quiets the voice. And there is no way to deny it. No way to stand in the crowd, uttering one's family language.

My heart broke all over again. I wanted my life back, my mama, but I knew I would never have that. The child I had been was gone with the child she had been. We were new people, and we didn't know each other anymore. I shook my head desperately.

It’s a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realize what’s changed, is you.

As the warm air blew in the car, simple snapshots of the life they'd lived together surfaced in his mind; but as always, those images led inexorably to their final day together.

You are so close, and I can’t reach you.

Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.

The house, the pond, the tree-it was all both overwhelmingly familiar and different from what she remembered-smaller and shabbier, somehow. It was like waking up to find that your reflection in the mirror had aged overnight, or had sprouted a new mole: You were forced to admit that things changed, whether you gave them permission to or not.

I remember watching Romeo + Juliet when I was 14 and listening to the soundtrack. When I hear that soundtrack now, all those emotions come back. It's really beautiful when you're at a certain point in your life where most of the adventure lies ahead of you. And it's a sad thing when you feel like you've lost that. But you can get it back.

Sometimes I miss the old me.

I look back at the past as fond memories but I'm able to move forwards in a new light, like I'm reborn.