Lauren Oliver

You can't be happy unless you're unhappy sometimes.

I guess that’s just part of loving people: You have to give things up. Sometimes you even have to give them up.

I'd rather die on my own terms than live on theirs. I'd rather die loving Alex than live without him.

Find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.

This is what I want. This is the only thing I've ever wanted. Everything else—every single second of every single day that has come before this very moment, this kiss—has meant nothing.

And you can't love, not fully, unless you are loved in return.

And it's the funniest thing: as soon as I see it, the whistling in my ears stops and the feeling of terror drains away, and I realize this whole time I haven't been falling at all. I've been floating.

He is my world and my world is him and without him there is no world.

And now I know why they invented words for love, why they had to: It's the only thing that can come close to describing what I feel in that moment, the baffling mixture of pain and pleasure and fear and joy, all running sharply through me at once.

Now I'd rather be infected with love for the tiniest sliver of a second than live a hundred years smothered by a lie.

I love you. Remember. They cannot take it

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.

Popularity's a weird thing. You can't really define it, and it's not cool to talk about, but you know it when you see it. Like a lazy eye, or porn.

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.

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.

We wanted the freedom to love. We wanted the freedom to choose. Now we have to fight for it.

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

If you’re smart, you care. And if you care, you love.