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
I think all artists are only interested in a couple of themes, really. I'm primarily interested in change and connection as being this restorative force. I write about them because that's what I think about in my own life.
I was a troubled teen and I was constantly looking for someone to throw me a rope. Those ropes are connections. They allow us to see that life exists beyond the little worlds we are currently a part of.
And for a moment―for a split second―everything else falls away, the whole pattern and order of my life, and a huge joy crests in my chest. I am no one, and I owe nothing to anybody, and my life is my own.
Nobody ever said life was fair.
It's amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast.
What glitters may not be gold; and even wolves may smile; and fools will be led by promises to their deaths.
I need to live my life in the light of their deaths. I need to live.
Love. I love you. I’ll always love you, my love. You are the love of my life.
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.
The kidnapping, the kiss. I brought him here, after all. I rescue him an pulled him into this new life, a life of freedom and feeling.
But that's the beauty of life: time is yours to keep and to change. Just a few minutes can be sufficient to carve a new road, a new track. Just a few minutes, and the void is kept at bay. You will live forever with that new road inside of you, stretching away to a place suggested, barely, on the horizon. For the shortest time, shorter than the shortest second's breath, you get to stand up to infinity. But eventually, and always, infinity wins.
Maybe you can afford to wait. Maybe for you there's a tomorrow. Maybe for you there's one thousand tomorrows, or three thousand, or ten, so much time you can bathe in it, roll around it, let it slide like coins through you fingers. So much time you can waste it. But for some of us there's only today. And the truth is, you never really know.
You have to go forward: It's the only way. You have to go forward no matter what happens. This is the universal law.
When you love someone, when you care for someone, you have to do it through the good and the bad. Not just when you're happy and it's easy.