Lauren Oliver Quotations | Page 4

Everything looks stark and vivid and frozen, as though drawn precisely and outlined in ink - parents' smiles frozen, camera flashes blinding, mouths open and white teeth glinstening, dark glossy hair and deep blue sky and unrelenting light, everyone drowning in light - everything so clear and perfect I'm sure it must already be a memory, or a dream.

Nobody ever said life was fair.

There is only what you want and what happens. There is only grabbing on and holding tight in the darkness.

We are such small, stupid things. For most of my life I thought of nature as the stupid thing: Blind, animal, destructive. We, the humans, were clean and smart and in control: we had wrestled the rest of the world into submission, battered it down, pinned it to a glass slide and the pages of The Bool of Shhh.

Love is a kind of possession. It’s a poison.

Amor deliria nervosa: It affects your mind so that you cannot think clearly, or make rational decisions about your own well-being. Symptom number twelve.

My former people were not totally wrong. Love is a kind of possession. It’s a poison. And if Alex no longer loves me, I can’t bear to think that he might love somebody else.

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.

I’m sorry for everything.” Then he turns and pushes back into the woods, and he’s gone.

I'm mesmerized by the way his fingers move confidently along her skin, as though her body is his to reat and touch and tend to. She was mine before she was yours: The words are there, unexpectedly, surging from my throat to my tongue. I swallow them back.