“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.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Hana
“There is only what you want and what happens. There is only grabbing on and holding tight in the darkness.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Hana
“All this time, I thought we were growing apart because I was leaving Lena behind. But really it was the reverse. She was learning to lie.
She was learning to love.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Hana
“For the first time in a long time, I actually look at her. I've always thought Lena was pretty, but now it occurs to me that at some point - last summer? last year? - she became beautiful.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Hana
“I'm mesmerized by the way his fingers move confidently along her skin, as though her body is his to reat and touch and tend to. She was mine before she was yours: The words are there, unexpectedly, surging from my throat to my tongue. I swallow them back.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Hana
“And when we are with Alex, I might as well not be there. They speak in a language of whispers and giggles and secrets; their words are like a fairy-tale tangle of thorns, which place a wall between us.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Hana
“Time becomes a stutter-the space between drumbeats, splintered into fragments, and also endlessly long, as long as soaring guitar notes that melt into one another, as full as the dark mass of bodies around me. I feel like the air downstairs has gone to liquid, to sweat and smell and sound, and I have broken apart in it. I am wave: I am pulled into the everything. I am energy and noise and a heartbeat going boom, boom, boom, echoing the drums.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Hana
“This is one of my favorite things about the Underground: the crashing of the cymbals, the screeching guitar riffs, music that moves into the blood and makes you feel hot and wild and alive.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Hana
“As Steve draws me closer to the band, all I can see is a frenzied mass of seething, writhing people, like a many-headed sea snake, grinding, waving their arms, stamping their feet, jumping. No rules, just energy - so much energy, you could harness it; I bet you could power Portland for a decade. It is more than a wave. It's a tide, an ocean of bodies.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Hana
“She was mine before she was yours.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Hana
“Every day, streets papered with more and more for .
Reward, reward, reward.
Reward for information.
If you see something, say something.
A paper town, a paper world: paper rustling in the airm whispering to me, hissing out a message of posion and jealousy.
If you know something, do something.
I'm sorry, Lena.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Hana
“Perfect. There’s the word again: a locked-door word – stifling, strangling.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Hana
“I don't know exactly what to wish for: to be safe or unsafe, for things to change or for things to stay the same.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Hana
“If she could see the beauty of this underground world, and appreciate what it means: the music, the dancing, the feeling of fingertips and lips, like a moment of flight after a lifetime of crawling.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Hana
“But I am going to keep going. I am going to soar, and soar, and break away—up, up, up into the thundering noise and the wind, like a bird being sucked into the sky.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Hana
“She'll be fine," Alex says dismissively, as though I shouldn't worry about it—as though it's none of my concern. I have the sudden urge to kick him in the back of his head. He is kneeling in front of Lena, dabbing antibacterial cream on her leg. I'm mesmerized by the way his fingers move confidently along her skin, as though her body is his to treat and touch and tend to. She was mine before she was yours: The words are there, unexpectedly, surging from my throat to my tongue. I swallow them back.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Hana
“Tonight the man in the moon looks as though he’s winking, or smirking: a moon with secrets.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Hana
“Lena Ella Haloway Tiddle." I pronounce her full name, very slowly, partly because I need to reassure myself of her existence—Lena, my friend, the worried one, the one who always pleaded for safety first, who now makes secret appointments to meet with boys. "You have some explaining to do."
"Hana, you remember Alex," Lena says weakly, as though that—the fact of my remembering him—explains anything.
"Oh, I remember Alex," I say. "What I don't remember is why Alex is here. "
Lena makes a few unconvincing noises of excuse. Her eyes fly to his. A message passes between them. I can feel it, encoded and indecipherable, like a zip of electricity, as though I've just passed too close to one of the border fences. My stomach turns. Lena and I used to be able to speak like that.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Hana
“Then someone knocks on the door, very clearly, four times. I pull away from Lena quickly.
"What's that?" I say, dragging my forearm across my eyes, trying to get control of myself. Lena tries to pass it off as though she hadn't heard. Her face has gone white, her eyes wide and terrified. When the knocking starts up again, she doesn't move, just stays frozen where she is.
"I thought nobody comes in this way." I cross my arms, watching Lena narrowly. There's a suspicious needling, pricking at some corner of my mind, but I can't quite focus on it.
"They don't. I mean—sometimes—I mean, the delivery guys—"
As she stammers excuses, the door opens, and he pokes his head in—the boy from the day Lena and I jumped the gate at the lab complex, just after we had our evaluations. His eyes land on me and he, too, freezes.
At first I think there must be a mistake. He must have knocked on the wrong door. Lena will yell at him now, tell him to clear off. But then my mind grinds slowly into gear and I realize that no, he has just called Lena's name. This was obviously planned.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Hana
“For the first time in a long time, I actually look at her. I've always thought Lena was pretty, but now it occurs to me that at some point—last summer? last year?—she became beautiful. Her eyes seem to have grown even larger, and her cheekbones have sharpened. Her lips, on the other hand, look softer and fuller.
I've never felt ugly next to Lena, but suddenly I do. I feel tall and ugly and bony, like a straw-colored horse.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Hana
“the desire to see him, to kiss him again, to let him put his fingers in my hair—is a monstrous, constant, crawling feeling in my blood and bones. It”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Hana
“I have Lena back again, but she is changed, and it seems that every day she grows a little more different, a little more distant, as though I am watching her walk down a darkening hallway.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Hana
“I let the music drill through my teeth and drip out my hair and pound through my eyeballs. I taste it, like grit and sweat.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Hana
“The flyers lift and sigh in unison, like a thousand people waving white handkerchiefs, a thousand people waving good-bye.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Hana
“It’s worse than a disease. It’s a poison.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Hana
“Hana?" Lena says softly. "Are you okay?"
That single stupid question breaks me. All the metal fingers relax me at once, and the tears they've been holding back come surging up at once. Suddenly I am sobbing and telling her everything: about the raid, and the dogs, and the sounds of skulls cracking underneath regulator's nightsticks. Thinking about it again makes me feel like I might puke. At a certain point, Lena puts her arms around me and starts murmuring things into my hair. I don't even know what she's saying, and I don't care. JUst having her here—solid, real, on my side—makes me feel better than I have in weeks. Slowly I manage to stop crying, swallowing back the hiccups and sobs that are still running through me. I try to tell her that I've missed her, and that I've been stupid and wrong, but my voice is muffled and thick”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Hana
“I came to find you last night," Lena says more quietly. "When I knew there was going to be a raid...I snuck out. I was there when—when the regulators came. I barely made it out. Alex helped me. We hid in a shed until they were gone..."
I close my eyes and reopen them. I remember wiggling into the damp earth, bumping my hip against the window. I remember standing, and seeing the dark forms of bodies lying like shadows in the grass, and the sharp geometry of a small she shed, nestled in the trees.
Lena was there. It was almost unimaginable.
"I can't believe that. I can't believe you snuck out during a raid—for me." My throat feels thick again, and I will myself not to start crying. For a moment I am overwhelmed by a feeling so huge and strange, I have no name for it: It surges over the guilt and the shock and the envy; it plunges a hand into the deepest part of myself and roots me to Lena.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Hana
Lauren Oliver
Born place: New York, New York
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“Our sense of our own freedom results from our not paying attention to what it is actually like to be what we are. The moment we do pay attention, we begin to see that free will is nowhere to be found, and our subjectivity is perfectly compatible with this truth. Thoughts and actions simply arise in the mind. What else could they do? The truth about us is stranger than many suppose: The illusion of free will is itself an illusion.”
― Sam Harris, quote from The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
“Elinor would have surely ignored them, such was her habit and her inclination, even though she knew whenever someone ignored what hurt her most, she'd wind up in grave circumstances. Ignore love, she now understood, and a person might bleed forever, even if no one could tell.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Probable Future
“A man who has no fear can do anything he wants, Feliks thought. He had learned that lesson eleven years ago, in a railway siding outside Omsk. It had been snowing . . .”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Man From St. Petersburg
“I took a moment to stare at all the leather and metal buckles. And now I begin my career as a dominatrix.”
― Sarah Fine, quote from Sanctum
“I will tell you how to become rich. Close the doors. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful”
― Warren Buffett, quote from The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America
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