Lauren Oliver Quotes

I open the door of the cell and go. I am so bowed I only see my feet, if I open my eyes, and between my legs a little trail of black dust. I say to myself that the earth is extinguished, though I never saw it lit.

I have watched patients stand and gaze longingly toward the city they in all likelihood will never enter again. It means liberty and life; it seems so near, and yet heaven is not further from hell.

I don't think words reach people. Maybe nothing does

Sharing a room with a cadaver is only mildly different from being in a room alone. They are the same sort of company as people across from you on subways or in airport lounges, there but not there. Your eyes keep going back to them, for lack of anything more interesting to look at, and then you feel bad for staring.

I think that occasionally running away and crashing where people can't find you is important.

He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.

Just think about it," he said softly. "You can do practically anything. You can have practically everything. And none of it will keep you from being alone." "Shut up shut up...Everybody's alone." He nodded. "But some people learn how to live with it.

For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead. It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can.

People talking without speaking,/ People listening without hearing...Sounds of Silence.

A man who will not leave his room because he does not know how, or is afraid to open the door, is trapped just the same whether or not the door is locked.

The living have never shown me how to live.

[Marriage] happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.

At the age of twenty six I am in the condition of an aged person - all my old friends are gone... & my heart fails when I think by how few ties I hold to the world.

What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.

But you know who you are when you're on your own out there in all that emptiness. There's no past, no holding on to the scraps that are all you've got left. Everything is that minute, or maybe tomorrow, not yesterday.

Cold sinks in, there to stay. And people, they'll leave you, sure. There's no return to what was and no way back. There's just emptiness all around, and you in it, like singing up from the bottom of a well, like nothing else, until you harm yourself, until you are a mad dog biting yourself for sympathy. Because there is no relenting.

Loneliness in a crowd of people was the worst kind of loneliness, but she couldn't help it.

For the first time in our lives, I’m somewhere she can’t find, and I don’t have the map to give her that leads to me.

His pacing stopped. The mattress sighed as he sat on the edge. seconds ticked by before he spoke so softly she could barely hear. "Sometimes I want to leave this town so bad I can taste it.

And now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky. She was weary of being outdoors, but she was not ready to go in. Was that really all there was in life, indoors or out? Wasn't there somewhere else for people to go?

I'm lonely! I'm bored!

The loneliest people in the world are those who have exhausted pleasure and come away empty.

Everybody's talking about people breaking into houses but there are more people in the world who want to break out of houses.

I felt alone on the planet, drifting through the cosmos. With both hands I reached out to the night. There was no answer. Or maybe I just couldn't hear it.