Quotes From "Rooms" By Lauren Oliver

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. Lauren Oliver

The world has nothing to offer me, no single shred of interest. I'm a woman trapped on a balcony, watching a passing parade, a blur of noise and motion that eventually turns to a single point on the horizon, a gutter full of trampled and muddy cups, and the sense of wasting an afternoon. Lauren Oliver

It was unfair that people could pretend to be one thing when they were really something else. That they would get you on their side and then do nothing but fail, and fail, and fail again. People should come with warnings, like cigarette packs: involvement would kill you over time. Lauren Oliver

I learned to swallow words back, hold secrets on my tongue until they dissolved like soap bubbles. Lauren Oliver

I guess we all have some of these - memories like artillery shells, fired at close range. Lauren Oliver

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. Lauren Oliver

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. Lauren Oliver

But those are just words, and words are just stories, and eventually, always, stories come to an end. Lauren Oliver

I can't stop thinking about what Caroline said to Minna about death. It isn't an infection, she said. She might be right. Then again, we've nested in the walls like bacteria. We've taken over the house, its insulation and its plumbing - we've made it our own. Or maybe it's life that's the infection: a feverish dream, a hallucination of feelings. Death is purification, a cleaning, a cure. Lauren Oliver

Stop your idiocy, Sandra, please. For once in your death. Lauren Oliver

She always imagined their voices entangled somewhere in the wires when they spoke, caught up in a grid she didn't fully understand, passing back and forth. Once the calls were disconnected, she imagined the echoes of old conversations would be trapped there, floating back and forth with no exit, like ghosts. Lauren Oliver

When I got home, my roof was gone. Overnight the weight of the snow became too much to carry. What tipped the scale? Think about it: there must have been a final snowflake that did it, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a milligram that made all the difference. Lauren Oliver