Lauren Oliver

Hunky Heroes, rescuing distressed women, captive princesses, and girls without wheels since 1684. p. 450

I don't understand how everything changes, how the layers of your life get buried. Impossible. At some point, at some time, we must all explode.

That__ a funny thing: you think, when awful things happen, everything else just stops, like you would forget to pee and eat and get thirsty, but it__ not really true. It__ like you and your body are two separate things, like your body is betraying you, chugging on, idiotic and animal, craving water and sandwiches and bathroom breaks while your world falls apart.

That__ when I realized that certain moments go on forever. Even after they__e over they still go on, even after you're dead and buried, those moments are lasting still, backward and forward, on into infinity. They are everything and everywhere all at once.

Of course. That's what people do in a disordered world, a world of freedom and choice: they leave when they want. They disappear, they come back, they leave again. And you are left to pick up the pieces on your own.

Recently I've been having the fantasy more and more" the one where Tack and I run away, disappear under the wide-open sky into the forest with leaves like green hands, welcoming us. In my fantasy, the more we walk, the cleaner we get, like the woods are rubbing away the past few years, all the blood and the fighting and the scars - sloughing off the bad memories and the false starts, leaving us shiny and new, like dolls just taken out of the package.And in this fantasy, my fantasy life, we find a stone cottage hidden deep in the forest, untouched, fitted with beds and rugs and plates and everything we need to live - like the owners just picked up and walked away, or like the house had been built for us and was just waiting all this time.We fish the stream and hunt the woods in the summer. We grow potatoes and peppers and tomatoes big as pumpkins. In the winter we stay inside by the fire while snow falls around us like a blanket, stilling the world, cocooning it in sleep.

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.

It's weird how much people change...It's kind of sad, if you think about it. Like there's no continuity in people at all. Like something ruptures when you hit twelve, or thirteen, or whatever the age is when you're no longer a kid but a "young adult", and after that you're a totally different person. Maybe even a less happy person. Maybe even a worse one.

He and I have a head-nod friendship, since that's pretty much the limit of our interaction.

And there it is: Even though we__e standing in the same patch of sun-drenched pavement, we might as well be a hundred thousand miles apart.

It's too late,' she says.And I say 'It's never too late.

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.

Take it from me: If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging up your back and runing its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do-the only thing-is run.

You can build walls all the way to the sky and I will find a way to fly above them. You can try to pin me down with a hundred thousand arms, but I will find a way to resist. And there are many of us out there, more than you think. People who refuse to stop believing. People who refuse to come to earth. People who love in a world without walls, people who love into hate, into refusal, against hope, and without fear.I love you. Remember. They cannot take it.

No guest rooms._ I shake my head resolutely. __ want to be in a room room. A lived-in room.

Everything has taken on a strange, distant quality - the sounds of running and shouting outside get warped and weird like they're being filtered through water, and Alex looks miles away. I start to think I might be dreaming, or about to pass

The hours here are flat and round, disks of gray layered one on top of the other...they move slowly, at a grind, until it seems as though they are not moving at all. They are just pressing down...

Most of the time - 99 percent of the time - you just don't know how and why the threads are looped together, and that's okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes. And very, very rarely - by some miracle of chance and coincidence, butterflies beating their wings just so and all the threads hanging together for a minute - you get the chance to do the right thing.