Pandemonium Quotes

“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.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

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

“I wonder if this is how people always get close: They heal each other's wounds; they repair the broken skin.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“If you’re smart, you care. And if you care, you love.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“But you can build a future out of anything. A scrap, a flicker. The desire to go forward, slowly, one foot at a time. You can build an airy city out of ruins.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“But...books are so much more. Some of them are webs; you can feel your way along their threads, but just barely, into strange and dark corners. Some of them are balloons bobbing up through the sky: totally self-contained, and unreachable, but beautiful to watch.
And some of them―the best ones―are doors.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“Love, the deadliest of all deadly things.
It kills you.
Alex.
When you have it.
Alex.
And when you don't.
Alex.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“That's the thing: We didn't really care. A world without love is also a world without stakes.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“Grief is like sinking, like being buried. I am in water the tawny color of kicked-up dirt. Every breath is full of choking. There is nothing to hold on to, no sides, no way to claw myself up. There is nothing to do but let go.

Let go. Feel the weight all around you, feel the squeezing of your lungs, the slow, low pressure. Let yourself go deeper. There is nothing but bottom. There is nothing but the taste of metal, and the echoes of old things, and days that look like darkness.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“I need him to know that I came for him. I need him to know that somehow, at some point in the tunnels, I began to love him.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“We all need mantras, I guess - stories we tell ourselves to keep us going.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“I want to know." His words are a whisper, barely audible. "I want to know with you.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“This is what hatred is. It will feed you and at the same time turn you to rot.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“Waste today, want tomorrow...”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“Something must die so
that others can live.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“Promise me we'll stay together, okay?" His eyes are once again the clear blue of a perfectly transparent pool. They are eyes to swim in, to float in, forever. "You and me."
"I promise," I say.
Behind us the door creaks open, and I turn around, expecting Raven, just as a voice cuts through the air: "Don't believe her.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“I’ve been trying so hard not to think his name, not to even breathe the idea of him”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“I read once about a kind of fungus that grows in trees. The fungus begins to encroach on the systems that carry water and nutrients up from the roots to the branches. It disables them one by one―it crowds them out. Soon, the fungus―and only the fungus―is carrying the water, and the chemicals, and everything else the tree needs to survive. At the same time it is decaying the tree slowly from within, turning it minute by minute to rot.
That is what hatred is. It will feed you and at the same time turn you to rot.
It is hard and deep and angular, a system of blockades. It is everything and total.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“Promise me we'll stay together, okay?" His eyes are once again the clear blue of a perfectly transparent pool. They are eyes to swim in, to float in, forever. "You and me."

"I promise," I say.

Behind us the door creaks open, and I turn around, expecting Raven, just as a voice cuts through the air: "Don't believe her."

The whole world closes around me, like an eyelid: For a moment, everything goes dark.

I am falling. My ears are full of rushing; I have been sucked into a tunnel, a place of pleasure and chaos. My head is about to explode.

He looks different. He is much thinner, and a scar runs from his eyebrow all the way down to his jaw. On his neck, just behind his left ear, a small tattooed number curves around the three-pronged scar that fooled me, for so long, into believing he was cured. His eyes-once a sweet, melted brown, like syrup-have hardened. Now they are stony, impenetrable.

Only his hair is the same: that auburn crown, like leaves in autumn.

Impossible. I close my eyes and reopen them: the boy from a dream, from a different lifetime. A boy brought back from the dead.

Alex.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“Alex loved books. He was the one who first introduced me to poetry. That's another reason I can't read anymore.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“We can never understand. We can only try, fumbling our way through the tunneled places, reaching for light.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“people themselves are full of tunnels: winding, dark spaces and caverns; impossible to know all the places inside of them. Impossible even to imagine.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“In a world without love, this is what people are to each other: values, benefits, and liabilities, numbers and data. We weigh, we quantify, we measure, and the soul is ground to dust.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“The only thing worse than having no friends is being pitied for having no friends.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“There is no before. There is only now, and what comes next.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“Live free or die.
Four words. Thirteen letters. Ridges, bumps, swirls under my fingertips.
Another story. We cling tightly to it, and our belief turns it to truth.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“When I’m running, there’s always this split second when the pain is ripping through me and I can hardly breathe and all I see is color and blur—and in that split second, right as the pain crests, and becomes too much, and there’s a whiteness going through me, I see something to my left, a flicker of color […]—and I know then, too, that if I only turn my head he’ll be there, laughing, watching me, and holding out his arms.

I don’t ever turn my head to look, of course. But one day I will. One day I will, and he’ll be back, and everything will be okay.

And until then: I run.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“We're on the other side of the fence now, Lena,' she says, tiredly, as she passes. "Don't you get it? You can't tell me what to feel.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“I guess there are some things you never get used to.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“Anger is useful only to a certain point. After that, it becomes rage, and rage will make you careless.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium