Lauren Oliver

Everyone just wasting time because they have so much of it to waste, minutes slipping by on who's with who and did you hear.

My point is: 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 your 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.

The secret is,_ I say, whispering right into his ear, __hat yours was the best kiss I__e ever had in my life.___ut I__e never kissed you,_ he whispers back. Around us the rain sounds like falling glass. __ot since third grade, anyway._ I smile, but I__ not sure if he can see it.__etter get started, then,_ I say, __ecause I don__ have much time.

Sometimes I feel like if you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you - sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever.

The details that are life's special pattern, like how in handwoven rugs what really makes them unique are the tiny flaws in the stitching, little gaps and jumps and stutters that can never be reproduced. so many things become beautiful when you really look.

At the same time I know that it__ not really their fault, at least not completely. I did my part too. I did it on a hundred different days and in a thousand different ways, and I know it. But this makes the anger worse, not better.

Here's one of the things I learned that morning: if you cross a line and nothing happens, the line loses meaning. It's like that old riddle about a tree falling in a forest, and whether it makes a sound if there's no one around to hear it. You keep drawing a line farther and farther away, crossing it every time. That's how people end up stepping off the edge of the earth.

Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge. That's what it is: an edge; a razor. It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away on either side.

[S]he'd realized that he had loved her only because she belonged to him.

I know that the whole point__he only point__s tofind the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse tolet them go.

With the cure, relationships are all the same, and rules and expectations are defined. Without the cure, relationships must be reinvented every day, languages constantly decoded and deciphered. Freedom is exhausting.

Finishing books - and leaving the world you've created - is always a kind of emotionally wrenching experience. I usually cry.

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.

Live free or die.

Mama, Mama, help me get homeI'm out in the woods, I am out on my own.I found me a werewolf, a nasty old muttIt showed me its teeth and went straight for my gut.Mama, Mama, help me get homeI'm out in the woods, I am out on my own.I was stopped by a vampire, a rotting old wreckIt showed me its teeth and went straight for my neck.Mama, Mama, put me to bedI won't make it home, I'm already half-dead.I met an Invalid, and fell for his artHe showed me his smile, and went straight for my heart.-From "A Child's Walk Home," Nursery Rhymes and Folk Tales

Dystopian novels help people process their fears about what the future might look like; further, they usually show that there is always hope, even in the bleakest future.

What did Saturday's used to taste like? Like eggs and fried ham and the bitter smell of hair in heavy rollers. Like long quiet hours and making up after a fight. Like ointment and bruising. Like waiting, especially, for something - anything - to happen.

Juliet!' I whip around but not quickly enough. She's swallowed by the crowd, the gap that allowed her to break for the door closing just as quickly as it opened, a shifting Tetris pattern of bodies...