Lauren Oliver
Lauren Oliver
Lauren Oliveris an American author of the New York Times bestselling YA novels Before I Fall, which was published in 2010; Panic; and the Delirium trilogy: Delirium, Pandemonium and Requiem, which have been translated into more than thirty languages. She is a 2012 E.B. White Read-Aloud Award nominee for her middle-grade novel Liesl & Po, as well as author of the fantasy middle-grade novel The Spindlers. Panic, which was published in March 2014, has been optioned by Universal Pictures in...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionYoung Adult Author
Date of Birth8 November 1982
CityQueens, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Suicide. A sideways word, a word that people whisper and mutter and cough: a word that must be squeezed out behind cupped palms or murmured behind closed doors. It was only in dreams that I heard the word shouted, screamed.
I cry for everything I abandoned and because I, too, have been left behind -- by Alex, by my mom, by time that has cut through our worlds and separated us.
One of the strangest things about life is that it will chug on, blind and oblivious, even as your private world - your little carved-out sphere - is twisting and morphing, even breaking apart.
I wonder if it's ever really possible to know the truth about someone else, or if the best we can do is just stumble into each other, heads down, hoping to avoid collision. I...wonder how many people are clutching secrets like little fists, little rocks sitting in the pits of their stomachs. All of them, maybe.
And even if she isn’t—even if by some miracle, she survived the escape and has been squeezing out a living in the Wilds—she would never join forces with the resisters. She would never be violent or vengeful. Not Lena, who used to practically faint when she pricked a finger, who couldn’t even lie to a teacher about being late. She wouldn’t have the stomach for it.
And when I wake up it's wonderful, like I've been carried quietly onto a calm, peaceful shore, and the dream, and its meaning, has broken over me like a wave and is ebbing away now, leaving me with a single, solid certainty. I know now.
Finishing books - and leaving the world you've created - is always a kind of emotionally wrenching experience. I usually cry.
I didn't realize then what a privilege that was: to be bored with your best friend; to have time to waste.
Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge.
Please understand. Please forgive me. I prayed every day for you to be alive, until hope became painful. Don't hate me. I still love you.
Why couldn't you let me have it? Why did you have to take it? Why did you always take everything?
When he speaks again, I can tell that he's smiling. "So I guess we saved each other.
Sometimes I think maybe they were right all along, the people on the other side in Zombieland. Maybe it would be better if we didn't love. If we didn't lose either. If we didn't get our hearts stomped on, shattered: if we didn't have to patch and repatch until we're like Frankenstein monsters, all sewn together and bound up by who knows what. If we could just float along, like snow. But how could anyone who's ever seen a summer - big explosions of green and skies lit up electric with splashy sunsets, a riot of flowers and wind that smells like honey - pick the snow?
And even though I'm standing in the middle of the biggest crowd I've ever seen in my life, I suddenly feel very alone.