Lauren Oliver

An eye for an eye." "And the whole world goes blind," Coral puts in quietly.

Power isn't free. Energy isn't free. It has to be earned.

This is the mistake they make above. They think that only certain people habe a place. Only certain kinds of people belong. The rest is waste. But even waste must have a place. Otherwise it will clog and clot, and rot and fester.

It's amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast.

So many things become beautiful when you really look

But for now, the future, like the past, means nothing. For now, there is only a homestead built of trash and scraps, at the edge of a broken city, just beyond a towering city dump; and our arrival-hungry, and half-frozen, to a place of food and water and walls that keep out the brutal winds. This, for us, is heaven.

It__ for the best. But no matter how many times I repeat it, the strange, hollow feeling in my stomach doesn__ go away. And ridiculous as it is, I can__ shake the persistent, needling feeling that I__e forgotten something, or missed something, or lost something forever.

Now, after so many years, I understand what the Coldness was and where it came from__his sense that everything is lost, and worthless, and meaningless.

Who the hell calls at two in the morning?""Maybe it's Matt Wilde, confessing his love," Lindsay says."Very funny,

Time waits for no man, but progress waits for man to inact it.

My aunt just stood there, and in that second it was as though the world and the future collapsed down into a single point, and I understood that this__he kitchen, the spotless cream linoleum floors, the glaring lights, and the vivid green mass of Jell-O on the counter__as all that was left now that my mother was gone.Suddenly I couldn__ stay there. I couldn__ stand the sight of my aunt__ kitchen, which I now understood would be my kitchen. I couldn__ stand the Jell-O. My mother hated Jell-O. An itchy feeling began to work its way through my body, as though a thousand mosquitoes were circulating through my blood, biting me from the inside, making me want to scream, jump, squirm.I ran.

Stop your idiocy, Sandra, please. For once in your death.

Of all the miracles Po had seen in the time and space of its death, Po thought this--the absorption of another, the carrying of it--was the most bewildering and remarkable of all. Whenever Bundle separated again, Po was left with an ache of sadness that reminded the ghost of the body it had left behind.

It was all very strange, Mr. Gray thought, as he wiped the coffee canister clean with a sponge. Very, very mysterious. You were born; you lived a whole life; and at the end, you wound up in a coffee canister."Ah, well," he said out loud quietly. "That's just the way things are. Life's a funny business." Death, he supposed, was the punch line.

Two weeks until your cure" she says finally. "Sixteen days" I say, but in my head I'm counting: Seven days. Seven days until I'm free and away from all these people and their sliding superficial lives brushing past one another gliding, gliding, gliding from life to death. For them there's hardly a change between the two.

It__ kind of sad, if you think about it. Like there__ no continuity in people at all. Like something ruptures when you hit twelve, or thirteen, or whatever the age is when you__e no longer a kid but a __oung adult,_ and after that you__e a totally different person. Maybe even a less happy person. Maybe even a worse one.

I'm scared all the time," she whispered. "You'd be an idiot if you weren't," Anne said. "And you wouldn't be brave either.

The sparrows jumped before they knew how to fly, and they learned to fly only because they had jumped