Lauren Oliver Quotes

I'm not after a closed system, I mean I'm after a complicated system in structure, but as far as watching it, I don't think that everything should be decided.

Reality has a quality of freedom about it that is hard to explain.

I am no longer going to become a fictional character to please people. That's too much work.

To live in a fully predictable world is not to be a man.

If you ever got me, you wouldn't have a clue what to do with me.

I don't want people to love me. It makes for obligations.

From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.

It is as certain as it is strange that truth and error come from one and the same source. Thus it is that we are often not at liberty to do violence to error, because at the same time we do violence to truth.

When you start to live outside yourself, it's all dangerous.

Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.

It is as easy to count atomies as to resolve the propositions of a lover.

The more you become a part of society, the less and less you are an individual, the less and less you are spontaneous - because the very membership in the society will not allow you to be spontaneous. You will have to follow the rules of the game. If you enter a society, you accept to follow those rules that the society is playing, or has decided to play.

I no longer have a borrowed soul. I no longer have borrowed thoughts or ideas. I no longer speak in a borrowed language.

Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice.

To be left alone on the tightrope of youthful unknowing is to experience the excruciating beauty of full freedom and the threat of eternal indecision.

To me the book is like having a kid. I have to let it go out in the world, and great things will happen. Maybe they won't, but it has to keep on moving.

Human nature turns out to be more complicated than the idea that people will get along if only the rules are clear enough. Uncertainty, the ultimate evil that modern law seeks to eradicate, generally fosters cooperation, not the opposite.

Ideally, both members of a couple in love free each other to new and different worlds.

I am free and that is why I am lost.

With some bands, there's a fear that if people do other things, the band is going to change and not hold it together. That's kind of sad; if you love someone, set them free, right?

I was doing a terrible thing in using the very books you clung to, to rebut you on every hand, on every point! What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and then they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.

There may be arrangements to have me retired but I don't know. Things happen that I enjoy doing, and as long as I enjoy doing them I'll go about doing them, I guess.

The case for individual freedom rests largely on the recognition of the inevitable and universal ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievements of our ends and welfare depend.

Before abstraction everything is one, but one like chaos; after abstraction everything is united again, but this union is a free binding of autonomous, self-determined beings. Out of a mob a society has developed, chaos has been transformed into a manifold world.

A significant idea of organization cannot be obtained in a world in which everything is necessary and nothing is contingent.