Lauren DeStefano Quotes

I start trying to stay unconscious. The problem with this is that no amount of willpower can change the reality.

This is the real Madame. I can see why she hides herself in accents and gems and exotic perfumes. I can see why she's grown to hate anything to do with love. She isn't evil or corrupt the way that Vaughn is. She's broken. Only broken.

Ah, love. That’s what the world has lost. There’s no more love, only the illusion of it.

Home?' I say. It's a word that can mean anywhere and nowhere.

They're making me go to school," Pram said. "I don't think it's a very good idea. I've read about how cruel kids can be.""Are you afraid they'll be cruel, or that being around them for too long will make you cruel?" Felix said."Both, I suppose.

There is a dark place calling to me, but I will not go just yet. I know I can't return from it.

My father warned me that you’re an interloper. He told me I should make you leave, since we’re no longer married and you’re not my concern,” he says. The thought gives me a chill. Yes, I’m sure Vaughn would love for his son to abandon me, so that Vaughn can swoop in and reclaim me the second I’m alone. But Linden adds, “I told him that wouldn’t be a good idea either.

I think he's beginning to understand, and understanding is a horrible thing.

A strange thing, words. Once they're said, it's hard to imagine they're untrue.

I don't dare touch her. Loss is a knowledge I'm sorry to have. Perhaps the only thing worse than experiencing it, is watching it replay anew in someone else--all the awful stages picking up like a chorus that has to be sung.

Trust is the strongest weapon.

Maybe it is desperation," I say. "Maybe we can't let things fall apart without trying. We can't let go of the people we love."He looks at me, and in the sunlight his eyes come alive with greens and golds. "Sometimes we can," he says.

Vaughn is talking about the heat, and his voice is so excited that it breaks into whispers at times. He loves his madness the way a bird loves the sky.

Living in a place like this, she must have learned how to see all the monsters that can hide a person.

Her hair is full of icy wind and daylight. She is every princess, every queen, in the history book.

There is no darkness like that of a confined space.

The madness of youth made me unafraid.

I see an ocean that’s spilled out of a wineglass, its body clear and sparkling and folding over itself. I see a ribbon of sand.

Pram wasn't told the story of her birth. But even as a very small girl, she felt deep in her chest that she was alive and dead at the same time.

You aren’t crazy,’ he says. ‘What?’ ‘I’ve known you all your life, and you’ve always tried to hide the parts of yourself that you think are wrong. But nothing is wrong with you.’ Those may be the best words he’s ever said to me.

Felix had left his heart buried in the ground years ago, but he felt it crack apart.

I think she's brave. I think that nobody has ever believed what she could be capable of. All her life, nobody was listening.

We're all born an empty page.

Lovers are weapons, but love is a wound.

Love unrequited is violent. He loves you so much that he's turned it into hate.

We didn't make ourselves," she says. "We aren't the greatest things to exist. I can't believe that. I won't believe that. We have too many faults.

It is the face of a girl who has seen the world, who realizes that it hates her, and who hates it in return.

When we're alive, life consumes us. But when we die, all of the color and the motion is gone so quickly, it's as though it can no longer stand to be wasted on us.

They're dead. We're alive. We have things to do.

I have always been fascinated by the ocean, to dip a limb beneath its surface and know that I'm touching eternity, that it goes on forever until it begins here again.

With free will comes inevitable error and misjudgement

He talks softly, patiently, as I sit on the window ledge and watch boats with colorful triangles for sails scratch the ocean.

There's a world out there that nobody has bothered to promise her.

There is a silence so great that I can hear the ice crystals cracking and falling from eyelashes of girls who will never blink again.

I wish I had a memory of that first violent shove, the shock of cold air, the sting of oxygen into new lungs. Everyone should remember being born. It doesn't seem fair that we only remember dying.

And so ends his rush from his greatest act of rebellion. He understands that no matter where he runs or how high he flies, he will always have to come home.

I still don't know where you came from," he says. "Some days it's like you just fell from the sky.""Some days I feel like I did." I say.

The clouds took on the shape of dancers; from somewhere far off, Pram heard music before the clouds became normal again.

But there’s no such thing as free. There are only different and more horrible ways to be enslaved.

She knew that the dead hid pieces of themselves in the world. They buried organs in the living. They stuffed memories into trees and clouds and other innocuous things.

Felix wasn't sure of his limits, if he had limits. After he'd been dead a while, he began to suspect he could swim to the bottom of the oceans. Beyond that. He suspected that he could swim so far down that he'd eventually go through the center of the earth and come out the other side. He could swim into the clouds, into the stars. Maybe there were ghosts on the other planets. Maybe there were ghosts laughing and splashing each other with the heat of the sun. He wasn't brave enough to find out.

A feeling can't kill you.

Just being alive feels so arduous that all I want to do is climb under the covers and sleep.

Jenna, standing in the doorway with her mouth and hand full of shelled pistachios, says, '"Real' is a dirty word in this place'.

Stone gnomes and angels filled the gardens, and it seemed that they were also sleeping, as though a witch had cast a spell on them.

We'll squeeze every second that we can from our lives, because we're young, and we have plenty of years to grow. We'll grow until we're braver. We'll grow until our bones ache and our skin wrinkles and our hair goes white, and until our hearts decide, at last, that it's time to stop.

I think humans have always been desperate. I think it has always been about doing something awful if it might help, when the only other option is death. Maybe that's what being a parent is supposed to feel like.

She's been conned, ruined, left for dead, and she's not going to forgive any of it. She will soldier on, if only out of spite.

It taught that there are three versions of things: the one I see in my mind, and the one that carries onto the paper, and then what it ultimately becomes.

He looks at me, and I don't know what he sees. I used to think it was Rose. But she's not here with us now, in this room. It's just him and me, and the books. I feel like our lives are in those books. I feel like all the words on the pages are for us.

You can try to please everyone and risk accomplishing nothing, or go for your dreams and risk pissing a few people off.

This time as we ascend, I watch the world sinking below us. I watch the way the city fades into sand that gets washed by the ocean.

Don't you miss it?" I say. "Being free."He laughs.

Wanting to be happy is not stupid.

She’s a commodity in a sea of broken girls.

People die, and everything they've ever said just echoes around and around. There's nothing new. Only the same nonsense from their lives.

I watch the ashes swim around like dandelion puffs, making swirls where bodies and walls once stood.

It's quiet for a while, and then Rowan says; "We could talk now. We're alone out here. No walls.""There are always walls." I say.

We were his disposable things. Brought to him like cattle. Stripped of what made us sisters or daughters or children. There was nothing that he could take from us—our genes, our bones, our wombs—that would ever satisfy him. There was no other way that we would be free.

It's best to let her go," he says.No, no, that's wrong. It's never right to give up on someone.