Lauren Oliver

Nothing has ever been so painful or delicious as being so close to him and being unable to do anything about it: like eating ice cream so fast on a hot day you get a splitting headache.

His eyes are blazing with light, more light than all the lights in every city in the whole world, more light than we could ever invent if we had ten thousand billion years.

If they really want us to be happy, they'd let us pick ourselves.

This was progress. This was modernity: you could cover over the past completely. You could bury the old under a relentless surface of new, stretched from corner to corner.

He believed in people. He believed that if people could only be shown the right way-the way to health and order, a way to be free of unhappiness-they would make the right choice. They would obey.

Up and down, up and down, a ladder of choices leading to the next choice, and the next, until suddenly you've run out of choices, and ladder, and you find time as rare and thin as air on a mountain. Then it's oops, sorry, turn's over.

Please understand. Please forgive me.I prayed every day for you to be alive, until hope became painful.Don't hate me.I still love you.

Everyone is asleep. They've all been asleep for years. You seemed ... awake.' Alex is whispering now. He closes his eyes, opens them again.'I'm tired of sleeping.

I know the rules. I've been living here longer than you have."He cracks a smile then. He nudges me back. "Hardly.""Born and raised. You're a transplant." I nudge him again, a little harder, and he laughs and tries to catch hold of my arm. I squirm away, giggling, and he stretches out to tickle my stomach. "Country bumpkin!" I squeal, as he grabs out and wrestles me back onto the blanket, laughing."City slicker," he says, rolling over on top of me, and then kisses me. Everything dissolves: heat, explosions of color, floating.

It's the rule of the wilds. You must be bigger, and stronger, and tougher. A coldness radiates through me, a solid wall that is growing, piece by piece, in my chest. He doesn't love me.He never loved me.It was all a lie."The old Lena is dead." I say, and then push past him. Each step is more difficult than the last; the heaviness fills me and turns my limbs to stone.You must hurt or be hurt.

See?_ my mother would say, smiling at me and my sister, Carol, in turn. __e live in the greatest country on earth. See how lucky we are?__nd yet the ash continued swirling down, and the smells of death came through the windows, crept under the door, hung in our carpets and curtains, and screamed of her lie.Is it possible to tell the truth in a society of lies? Or must you always, of necessity, become a liar?And if you lie to a liar, is the sin somehow negated or reversed?These are the kinds of questions I ask myself now: in these dark, watery hours, when night and day are interchangeable. No. Not true.

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

I keep having the urge to cross my hands over my chest, to cover up my breasts, to hide. I'm suddenly aware of how pale I look in the sunshine, and how many moles I have spotting up and down my chest, and I just know he's looking at me thinking i'm wrong or deformed. But the he breathes, 'Beautiful' and when his eyes meet mine I know that he really, truly means it.

Not gray, exactly. Right before the sun rises there's a moment when the whole sky goes this pale nothing color-not really gray but sort of, or sort of white, and I've always really liked it because it reminds me of waiting for something good to happen.

Are you sure that being like everybody else will make you happy?""I don't know any other way.""Let me show you."And then we're kissing. Or at least, I think we're kissing__'ve only seen it done a couple of times, quick closed-mouth pecks at weddings or on formal occasions. But this isn't like anything I've ever seen, or imagined, or even dreamed: this is like music or dancing but better than both.

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

Running is a mental sport, more than anything else. You're only as good as your training, and your training is only as good as your thinking.

Don't you get it? You can't tell me what to feel.