Olivia > Olivia's Quotes

“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, 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, Requiem

“The deadliest of all deadly things: It kills you both when you have it and
when you don’t.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“Now I'd rather be infected with love for the tiniest sliver of a second than live a hundred years smothered by a lie.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“It's like a razor blade edging its way through my organs, shredding me, all I can think is: It will kill me, it will kill me, it will kill me. And I don't care.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“The flip side of freedom is this: When you're completely free, you're also completely on your own.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity.”
― Gilda Radner

“You save yourself or you remain unsaved.”
― Alice Sebold

“I just want to sleep. A coma would be nice. Or amnesia. Anything, just to get rid of this, these thoughts, whispers in my mind. Did he rape my head, too?”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

“I didn't want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that's really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you're so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.”
― Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace

“There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, 'There now, hang on, you'll get over it.' Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees

“That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

“Over time as most people fail the survivor's exacting test of trustworthiness, she tends to withdraw from relationships. The isolation of the survivor thus persists even after she is free.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“The problem with having problems is that ‘someone’ always has it worse.”
― Tiffany Madison, Black and White

“You have to know what you stand for, not just what you stand against.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

“Not all those who wander are lost.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“She is free in her wildness, she is a wanderess, a drop of free water. She knows nothing of borders and cares nothing for rules or customs. 'Time' for her isn’t something to fight against. Her life flows clean, with passion, like fresh water.”
― Roman Payne

“I'm not sure this is a world I belong in anymore. I'm not sure that I want to wake up.”
― Gayle Forman, If I Stay