Lauren Oliver

I feel as though I__ in a dream, where strange things are happening but they don__ feel strange. Everything is cloudy__verything is wrapped in a fog__nd I__ filled from head to toe with the single, burning desire to get closer to the music, to hear the music better, for the music to go on and on and on.

As soon as she sees me she swings forward and hits a key on her keyboard. The music cuts off instantly. Strangely, the silence that follows seems just as loud.

As Steve draws me closer to the band, all I can see is a frenzied mass of seething, writhing people, like a many-headed sea snake, grinding, waving their arms, stamping their feet, jumping. No rules, just energy - so much energy, you could harness it; I bet you could power Portland for a decade. It is more than a wave. It's a tide, an ocean of bodies.

My first kiss. A new kind of kiss, like the new kind of music still playing, softly, in the distance - wild and arrhythmic, desperate. Passionate.

This is one of my favorite things about the Underground: the crashing of the cymbals, the screeching guitar riffs, music that moves into the blood and makes you feel hot and wild and alive.

Music, I think, he makes me feel like music.

Everything in me feels fluttering and free, like I could take off from the ground at any second. Music, I think, he makes me feel like music.

I guess it's the same way trees grow around the very vines that are killing them, so they're strangled and sustained all at once. After a long time, even pain can be a comfort.

I am falling, tumbling through the air, but this time the darkness is alive around me, full of beating things, and I realize that I'm not surrounded by dark but have only had my eyes closed all this time. I open them, feeling silly, and at the same time a hundred thousand butterlies take off around me, so many of them in so many brilliant colors they are like a solid rainbow, temporarily obscuring the sun. But as they wing higher and higher they reveal a landscape below us, all green and gold and sun-drenched fields and pink-tinged clouds drifting underneath me, and the air around me is clear and blue and sweet smelling, and I'm laughing, laughing, laughing as I spin through the air because, of course, I haven't been falling all the time.I've been flying.

We are such small, stupid things. For most of my life I thought of nature as the stupid thing: Blind, animal, destructive. We, the humans, were clean and smart and in control: we had wrestled the rest of the world into submission, battered it down, pinned it to a glass slide and the pages of The Bool of Shhh.

People need other people to feel things for them," she said. "It gets lonely to feel things all by yourself.

I__l tell you another secret, this one for your own good. You may think the past has something to tell you. You may think that you should listen, should strain to make out its whispers, should bend over backward, stoop down low to hear its voice breathed up from the ground, from the dead places. You may think there__ something in it for you, something to understand or make sense of.But I know the truth: I know from the nights of Coldness. I know the past will drag you backward and down, have you snatching at whispers of wind and the gibberish of trees rubbing together, trying to decipher some code, trying to piece together what was broken. It__ hopeless. The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone.Take it from me: If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging at your back and running its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do__he only thing__s run.

If you__e smart, you care. And if you care, you love.

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 shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa

I was going to tell you that you look beautiful with your hair down. That's all I was going to say.

He Is looking at me through the smoke, across the fence. He never takes his eyes off me. His hair Is a crown of leaves, of thorns, of flames. 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.

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