“Take down the walls.
That is, after all, the whole point.
You do not know what will happen if you take down the walls; you cannot see through to the other side, don't know whether it will bring freedom or ruin, resolution or chaos. It might be paradise or destruction.
Take down the walls.
Otherwise you must live closely, in fear, building barricades against the unknown, saying prayers against the darkness, speaking verse of terror and tightness.
Otherwise you may never know hell; but you will not find heaven, either. You will not know fresh air and flying.
All of you, wherever you are: in your spiny cities, or your one bump towns. Find it, the hard stuff, the links of metal and chink, the fragments of stone filling you stomach.
And pull, and pull, and pull.
I will make a pact with you: I will do it if you will do it, always and forever.
Take down the walls.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
“And you can't love, not fully, unless you are loved in return.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
“How can someone have the power to shatter you to dust--and also to make you feel so whole?”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
“How did I love her?
Let me count the ways.
The freckles on her nose like the shadow of a shadow; the way she chewed on her lower lip when she walked and how when she ran she looked like she was born going fast and how she fit perfectly against my chest; her smell and the touch of her lips and her skin, which was always warm, and how she smiled.
Like she had a secret.
How she always made up words during Scrabble. Hyddym (secret music). Grofp (cafeteria food). Quaw (the sound a baby duck makes). How she burped her way through the alphabet once, and I laughed so hard I spat out soda through my nose.
And how she looked at me like I could save her from everything bad in the world.
This was my secret: she was the one who saved me.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
“He who jumps may fall, but he may also fly.
It’s time to jump.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
“But maybe happiness isn't in the choosing. Maybe it's in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
“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.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
“This is the strange way of the world, that people who simply want to love are instead forced to become warriors.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
“This is what amazes me: that people are new every day. That they are never the same. You must always invent them, and they must always invent themselves, too.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
“We wanted the freedom to love. We wanted the freedom to choose. Now we have to fight for it.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
“There are some losses we never get over.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
“I'll find you," he says, watching me with the eyes I remember. "I won't let you go again”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
“He is no longer mine to lose, but the grief is there, a gnawing sense of disbelief.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
“This is the past: It drifts, it gathers. If you are not careful, it will bury you.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
“Mama, Mama, put me to bed
I won’t make it home, I’m already half-dead
I met an Invalid, and fell for his art
He showed me his smile, and went straight for my heart.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
“The Story of Solomon is the only way I know how to explain.
And then, in smaller letters:
Forgive me.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
“But how could anyone who's ever seen a summer - big explosion of green and skies lit up electric with splashy sunsets, a riot of flowers and wind that smells like honey - pick the snow?”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
“That's the thing about faith. It works.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
“That is the rule of the Wilds: You must be bigger and stronger and tougher. You must hurt or be hurt.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
“Of course. That's what people do in a disordered world, a world of freedom and choice: they leave when they want. They disappear, they come back, they leave again. And you are left to pick up the pieces on your own.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
“And when it started to get dark you pointed to the sky, and told me there was a star for every thing you loved about me.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
“Love is a kind of possession. It’s a poison.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
“Perfection is a promise, and a reassurance that we are not wrong.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
“Over the past week, I’ve accepted that I will never love Julian as much as I loved Alex. But now that idea is overwhelming, like a wall between us. I will never love Julian like I love Alex.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
“You don't know shit about me, I don't know shit about you. You don't even know shit about you.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
“We are always being pushed and squeezed down one road or another. We have no choice but to step forward, and then step forward again, and then step forward again; suddenly we find ourselves on a road we haven't chosen at all.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
“Amor deliria nervosa: It affects your mind so that you cannot think clearly, or make rational decisions about your own well-being. Symptom number twelve.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
“Stop!” His voice rings out sharply, hard as a slap. He releases me and I stumble backward. “Alex is dead, do you hear me? All of that—what we felt, what it meant—that’s done now, okay? Buried. Blown away.”
“Alex!”
He has started to turn away; now he whirls around. The moon lights him stark white and furious, a camera image, two-dimensional, gripped by the flash. “I don’t love you, Lena. Do you hear me? I never loved you.”
The air goes. Everything goes. “I don’t believe you.” I’m crying so hard, I can hardly speak.
He takes one step toward me. And now I don’t recognize him at all. He has transformed entirely, turned into a stranger. “It was a lie. Okay? It was all a lie. Craziness, like they always said. Just forget about it. Forget it ever happened.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
“For a split second, he had looked almost like my Alex again.”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from Requiem
Lauren Oliver
Born place: New York, New York
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“For some sick reason, fighting with this woman always ended with her panties in my pocket.”
― Christina Lauren, quote from Beautiful Bastard
“Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with someone you loathe.”
― Azar Nafisi, quote from Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
“Being in love is a very strange thing. Your thoughts constantly drift towards this other person, no matter what you’re doing. You could be reaching for a glass in the cupboard or brushing your teeth or listening to someone tell a story, and your mind will just start drifting towards their face, their hair, the way they smell, wondering what they’ll wear, and what they’ll say the next time they see you. And on top of the constant dream state you’re in, your stomach feels like it’s connected to a bungee cord, and it bounces and bounces around for hours until it finally lodges itself next to your heart.”
― Pittacus Lore, quote from The Power of Six
“I didn't hit her, man, what happened was that Maria was obsessed with the Marquis de Sade and wanted to try the spanking thing," said Luscious Skin.
"That's very Maria," said Pancho. "She takes her reading seriously.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives
“And, even now, as he paced the streets, and listlessly looked round on the gradually increasing bustle and preparation for the day, everything appeared to yield him some new occasion for despondency. Last night, the sacrifice of a young, affectionate, and beautiful creature, to such a wretch, and in such a cause, had seemed a thing too monstrous to succeed; and the warmer he grew, the more confident he felt that some interposition must save her from his clutches. But now, when he thought how regularly things went on, from day to day, in the same unvarying round; how youth and beauty died, and ugly griping age lived tottering on; how crafty avarice grew rich, and manly honest hearts were poor and sad; how few they were who tenanted the stately houses, and how many of those who lay in noisome pens, or rose each day and laid them down each night, and lived and died, father and son, mother and child, race upon race, and generation upon generation, without a home to shelter them or the energies of one single man directed to their aid; how, in seeking, not a luxurious and splendid life, but the bare means of a most wretched and inadequate subsistence, there were women and children in that one town, divided into classes, numbered and estimated as regularly as the noble families and folks of great degree, and reared from infancy to drive most criminal and dreadful trades; how ignorance was punished and never taught; how jail-doors gaped, and gallows loomed, for thousands urged towards them by circumstances darkly curtaining their very cradles' heads, and but for which they might have earned their honest bread and lived in peace; how many died in soul, and had no chance of life; how many who could scarcely go astray, be they vicious as they would, turned haughtily from the crushed and stricken wretch who could scarce do otherwise, and who would have been a greater wonder had he or she done well, than even they had they done ill; how much injustice, misery, and wrong, there was, and yet how the world rolled on, from year to year, alike careless and indifferent, and no man seeking to remedy or redress it; when he thought of all this, and selected from the mass the one slight case on which his thoughts were bent, he felt, indeed, that there was little ground for hope, and little reason why it should not form an atom in the huge aggregate of distress and sorrow, and add one small and unimportant unit to swell the great amount.”
― Charles Dickens, quote from Nicholas Nickleby
The Raven King
Enclave
Pleasure Unbound
Columbine
The Two Princesses o...
My Man JeevesBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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