Quotes from Fever

Lauren DeStefano ·  341 pages

Rating: (41K votes)


“Everyone should remember being born. It doesn't seem fair that we only remember dying.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever


“Because even if the lie is beautiful, the truth is what you face in the end.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever


“Love unrequited is violent. He loves you so much that he's turned it into hate.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever


“It's best to let her go," he says.
No, no, that's wrong. It's never right to give up on someone.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever


“He kissed back, all the pages spread out around us like riddles waiting to be solved. Let them wait. Let my genes unravel, my hinges come loose. If my fate rests in the hands of a madman, let death come and bring its worse. I'll take the ruined craters of laboratories, the dead trees, this city with ashes in the oxygen, if it means freedom. I'd sooner die here than live a hundred years with wires in my veins.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever



“I lost everyone I loved," I tell him. I wait for him to look at me, and then I add, "The day I met you.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever


“I've done it all before, I tell myself, and I can do it again. Trust is the strongest weapon.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever


“...maybe hope isn't such a bad thing. Maybe it's what keeps us together.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever


“But there’s no such thing as free. There are only different and more horrible ways to be enslaved.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever


“Momentum,' She repeats. 'You can't just stand there if you want something to fly. You have to run.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever



“Do you know what my father used to say?" I ask her. "He used to say that songs had a heart. A crescendo that can make all your blood rush from your head to your toes.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever


“Once upon a time there were two parents, two children, and a brick house with lilies in the yard. The parents died, the lilies wilted. One child disappeared. Then the other.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever


“I used to have only one name; it used to mean something.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever


“It's never right to give up on someone.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever


“There's a sort of dead passion in him. A spark that, had he more years to live, would be a wildfire.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever



“I should not have loved my daughter as I did. Not in this world in which nothing lives for long. You children are flies. You are roses. You multiply and die.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever


“And then I wonder, does my brother think of me this way? We entered this world together, one after the other, beats in a pulse. But I will be first to leave it. That's what I've been promised. When we were children, did he dare to imagine an empty space beside him where I then stood giggling, blowing soap bubbles through my fingers?

When I die, will he be sorry that he loved me? Sorry that we were twins?

Maybe he already is.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever


“Things will get worse before they get better.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever


“I'm suddenly finding it hard to know the difference between nightmares and consciousness.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever


“Lovers are weapons, but love is a wound.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever



“It is the face of a girl who has seen the world, who realizes that it hates her, and who hates it in return.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever


“The thing about hope is that it doesn't go away even when it serves no purpose.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever


“Her mind is a bird that's trapped inside her skull, flapping and thrashing, never breaking free.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever


“She has the majesty of hurricanes and explosions.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever


“Living in a place like this, she must have learned how to see all the monsters that can hide a person.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever



“Ah, love. That’s what the world has lost. There’s no more love, only the illusion of it.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever


“I figured it out eventually," she says. She's sitting on the edge of the gurney again; her features slowly materialize as my vision clears. "It's momentum."

"What?" I whisper. The feeling returning to my lips, spreading out to my fingertips and toes.

"Momentum," she repeats. "You can't just stand there if you want something to fly. You have to run.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever


“There are so many of us, so many girls. The world wants us for our wombs or our bodies, or it doesn't want us at all.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever


“There was a desperate undercurrent to our marriage--a feeling of being in a dream from which I couldn't seem to awaken. A nagging sense that my life, laid out so neatly like the clothes Deirdre left on my divan, was no longer my own.”
― Lauren DeStefano, quote from Fever


About the author

Lauren DeStefano
Born place: in New Haven, CT, The United States
Born date October 13, 1984
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“All those beings who revealed truths to me and who were no longer there, seemed to me to have lived a life from which I alone profited and as though they had died for me. It was sad for me to think that in my book, my love which was once everything to me, would be so detached from a being that various readers would apply it textually to the love they experienced for other women. But why should I be horrified by this posthumous infidelity, that this man or that should offer unknown women as the object of my sentiment, when that infidelity, that division of love between several beings began with my life and long before I began writing? I had indeed suffered successively through Gilberte, through Mme de Guermantes, through Albertine. Successively also I had forgotten them and only my love, dedicated at different times to different beings, had lasted. I had anticipated the profanation of my memories by unknown readers. I was not far from being horrified with myself as, perhaps, some nationalist party might be in whose name hostilities had been provoked and who alone had benefited from a war in which many noble victims had suffered and died without even knowing the issue of the struggle which, for my grandmother, would have been such a complete reward. And the single consolation she never knew, that at last I had set to work, was, such being the fate of the dead, that though she could not rejoice in my progress she had at least been spared consciousness of my long inactivity, of the frustrated life which had been such a pain to her. And certainly there were many others besides my grandmother and Albertine from whom I had assimilated a word, a glance, but of whom as individual beings I remembered nothing; a book is a great cemetery in which, for the most part, the names upon the tombs are effaced.”
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