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
Grief is like sinking, like being buried.
I put my forehead on his collarbone, place one hand on his chest. Its rhythm reassures me: He is real, and he is now.
Who knows? Maybe they’re right. Maybe we are driven crazy by our feelings. Maybe love is a disease, and we would be better off without it. But we have chosen a different road. And in the end that is the point of escaping the cure: We are free to choose. We are even free to choose the wrong thing.
Life isn't life if you just float through it.
The question was: Will you meet me tomorrow? And the word was: Yes.
They told us love was a disease. They told us it would kill us in the end. For the very first time I realize, that this, too, might also be a lie.
Nothing has ever been so painful or delicious as being so close to him and being unable to do anything about it: like eating ice cream so fast on a hot day you get a splitting headache.
For the first time in my life I actually feel sorry for Carol. I'm only seventeen years old, and I already know something she doesn't know: I know that life isn't life if you just float through it. I know that the whole point- the only point- is to find things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.
For a second I feel a rush of sadness: for the horizons that vanish behind us, for the people we leave behind, the tiny-doll selves that get stored away and ultimately buried.
It was a bird. A bird struggling through stickiness: a bird coated in paint, floundering in its nest, splashing color everywhere. Red. Red. Red. Dozens of them: black feathers coated thickly with crimson-colored paint, fluttering among the branches. Red means run.
And in that moment, the wordless thing passed between us, the thing that wasn't quite love but was so close I could believe in it sometimes.
But that's the problem with love - it acts on you, works through you, resists your attempts to control.
We wanted the freedom to love. We wanted the freedom to choose. Now we have to fight for it.
Stupid how the mind will try to distract itself.