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
That's when you realize that most of it-life, the relentless mechanism of existing-isn't about you. It doesn't include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you've jumped the edge. Even after you're dead.
It's like high school holds two different worlds, revolving around each other an never touching; the haves and the have-nots. I guess it's a good thing. High school is supposed to prepare you for the real world, after all.
That's the way I feel, at least: like there's a real me and a reflection of me, and I have no way of telling which is which.
The mark of the procedure. A real one. Lu is cured.
I put my forehead on his collarbone, place one hand on his chest. Its rhythm reassures me: He is real, and he is now.
My heart is drumming in my chest so hard it aches, but it's the good kind of ache, like the feeling you get on the first real day of autumn, when the air is crisp and the leaves are all flaring at the edges and the wind smells just vaguely of smoke - like the end and the beginning of something all at once.
I think dystopian futures are also a reflection of current fears.
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.
That was what her parents did not understand—and had never understood—about stories. Liza told herself storied as though she was weaving and knotting an endless rope. Then, no matter how dark or terrible the pit she found herself in, she could pull herself out, inch by inch and hand over hand, on the long rope of stories.
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.
There are times I wish I was more conventional. I would get a husband and a baby and a big SUV in the 'burbs and be happy. But forging my own way - my career, my relationships with wonderful but troubled people - that's who I am.
One of the things I've tried to do in my career is really write different kinds of books, so I'm able to broaden people's expectations of what I'm allowed to do.
I try to write characters that are as real, emotionally and psychologically, as I can make them; I feel the same way about setting. This often means that I'm drawing from my experiences and observations.
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.