Best 183 quotes of Lauren Destefano on MyQuotes

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

And everywhere girls, tumbling from trees like orange blossoms and hitting the earth with sickening thuds. They crack open.

and I've always known it, the way I love a song I hear for the first time, even before I know all the words, the way I love my favorite color, and the way that the train would speed past my bedroom when it was very quiet and I'd feel it in my stomach rushing through me. I love you in a way that I've never felt needed to be said.

And then I wonder, does my brother think of me this way? We entered this world together, one after the other, beats in a pulse. But I will be first to leave it. That's what I've been promised. When we were children, did he dare to imagine an empty space beside him where I then stood giggling, blowing soap bubbles through my fingers? When I die, will he be sorry that he loved me? Sorry that we were twins? Maybe he already is.

A party in the orange grove. The pain on Linden's face is immediate. I am unwavering. He has cost me more pain than I will ever be able to repay.

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

Because even if the lie is beautiful, the truth is what you face in the end.

Before I can process what’s happening, Deirdre has opened her hands and Linden has taken the ring from her and slipped it onto my finger. “Rhine Ashby,” he says. “My wife.

Bet you never eat, he says. Bet you drink up the oxygen like it's butter. Bet you can go for days on nothing but thoughts.

But instead of tears, when I press my face against the pillow, a horrible, primal scream comes out of me. It's unlike anything I thought myself capable of. Rage, unlike anything I've ever known.

Childhood is a long, long road, from which that dark whispering forest of death seems an impossible destination.

Cure" is one of the most precious words in the English language. It's a short word. A clean and simple word. But it isn't so easy a thing as it sounds. There are questions like: How will this affect us in ten years? In twenty? What will it do to our children? Our children's children?

Did you tell freedom hello for me?

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

Do you know what my father used to say?" I ask her. "He used to say that songs had a heart. A crescendo that can make all your blood rush from your head to your toes.

Dystopian, by definition, promises a darker story.

Even the human race can't claim to be natural anymore. We are fake, dying things. How fitting that I would end up in this sham of a marriage.

Eventually I realize that I am holding on to him just as tightly as he holds on to me. And here we are: two small dying things, as the world ends around us like falling autumn leaves.

Fate, I think, is a thief.

For males twenty-five is the fatal age. For women it's twenty. We are all dropping like flies.

Gabriel's voice can reach me anywhere. Even in a hurricane.

Good night, sweetheart," he says. "Good bye, sweetheart," I say. And it's so casual, so innocent that he doesn't suspect a thing.

He gathers me up and I'm weightless before he sets me on the railing. He's the only thing keeping me from falling back, out of the reach of daylight. I'm not afraid of falling. I don't fear the sky beyond the train tracks like I did before. I can go anywhere just so long as it's with him.

He kissed back, all the pages spread out around us like riddles waiting to be solved. Let them wait. Let my genes unravel, my hinges come loose. If my fate rests in the hands of a madman, let death come and bring its worse. I'll take the ruined craters of laboratories, the dead trees, this city with ashes in the oxygen, if it means freedom. I'd sooner die here than live a hundred years with wires in my veins.

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.

Her mind is a bird that's trapped inside her skull, flapping and thrashing, never breaking free.

He says one word, nodding into the daylight. "Look." It's an astounding word. It's a gift.

He sits next to me, careful to avoid my hair that's splayed out around my head like blood. A bullet to the forehead, boom, blond waves everywhere.

His three wives are huddled together on the bare mattress, one of them dying; when we're together, we form an alliance he can't touch. He's scared to even try.

Hope, that risky, illustrious thing. It should have gone extinct by now, but we keep it alive.

Humans are the absolute worst thing to happen to this planet.

I always knew I was an excellent liar; I just didn't know that I had it in me to fool myself.

I can almost see what Gabriel meant when he asked, 'What has the free world got that you can’t get here?' Almost. Freedom, Gabriel. That’s what you can’t get here.

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.

I don't know if it was love or an illusion. I don't know if there's ever a way to be certain.

I figured it out eventually," she says. She's sitting on the edge of the gurney again; her features slowly materialize as my vision clears. "It's momentum." "What?" I whisper. The feeling returning to my lips, spreading out to my fingertips and toes. "Momentum," she repeats. "You can't just stand there if you want something to fly. You have to run.

I had this feeling like the solution to everything would be down there if only I could dig through all those clouds.

‎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.

I liked just being with you. I liked the way you breathed when you were asleep. I liked when you took the champagne glass from my hand. I liked how your fingers were always too long for your gloves.

I lost everyone I loved," I tell him. I wait for him to look at me, and then I add, "The day I met you.

I'm suddenly finding it hard to know the difference between nightmares and consciousness.

In another time, in another place, I wonder who they might have been.

I never wanted to live forever," she says. "I just wanted enough time.

I nod like I'm not at all unnerved by this new cold side to him. Not cruel like his father. Not warm like the husband who sought me out on quiet nights. Something in between. This Linden has never woven his fingers through mine, never chosen me from a line of weary Gathered girls, never said he loved me in a myriad of coloured lights. We are nothing to each other.

In the distance I see a lighthouse. The light washes over us and continues on its rotation. This time, I don't know where the light will guide us.

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.

I shake my head, watching snow tumble and swirl from an all-white sky. The world seems so clean if you only look up

I should not have loved my daughter as I did. Not in this world in which nothing lives for long. You children are flies. You are roses. You multiply and die.

I stare at her collarbone that's framed with lace, the hollow of her throat, her shoulders that rise with each rise with the weight of her next breath. We're fragile things. Our bones show through our skin. What would any god want with us?

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