Delirium Quotes

“Sometimes I feel like if you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you - sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“I said, I prefer the ocean when it's gray. Or not really gray. A pale, in-between color. It reminds me of waiting for something good to happen.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“He is my world and my world is him and without him there is no world.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“How can someone have the power to shatter you to dust--and also to make you feel so whole?”
― Lauren Oliver, Requiem

“Who knows? Maybe they’re right. Maybe we are driven crazy by our feelings. Maybe love is a disease, and we would be better off without it.
But we have chosen a different road. And in the end that is the point of escaping the cure: We are free to choose.
We are even free to choose the wrong thing.”
― Lauren Oliver, Requiem

“This is the strange way of the world, that people who simply want to love are instead forced to become warriors.”
― Lauren Oliver, Requiem

“I'd rather die on my own terms than live on theirs. I'd rather die loving Alex than live without him.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“Find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“Are you sure that being like everybody else will make you happy?"
"I don't know any other way."
"Let me show you."
And then we're kissing. Or at least, I think we're kissing—I've only seen it done a couple of times, quick closed-mouth pecks at weddings or on formal occasions. But this isn't like anything I've ever seen, or imagined, or even dreamed: this is like music or dancing but better than both.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“I told you," he whispers back. I can feel his breath just tickling the space behind my ear, making my hair prick up on my neck. "I like you."
"You don't know me," I say quickly.
"I want to, though.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“Alex loved books. He was the one who first introduced me to poetry. That's another reason I can't read anymore.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“You know the best thing about aeroplanes? Apart from the peanuts in the little silver bags, I mean.

It's looking out of the windows at the clouds, and thinking, maybe I could go walking in there. Maybe it's a special place where everything's okay.

Sometimes I do go walking in the clouds, but it's just cold and wet and empty. But when you look out of a plane it's a special world... and I like that.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 7: Brief Lives

“I wish I could close my eyes and be blown into dust and nothingness, feel all my thoughts disperse like dandelion fluff drifting off on the wind. But his hands keep pulling me back: into the alley, and Portland, and a world that has suddenly stopped making sense.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“This is what I want. This is the only thing I've ever wanted. Everything else—every single second of every single day that has come before this very moment, this kiss—has meant nothing.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“That is the rule of the Wilds: You must be bigger and stronger and tougher. You must hurt or be hurt.”
― Lauren Oliver, Requiem

“Not knowing everything is all that makes it OK, sometimes... ”
― Neil Gaiman, The Absolute Sandman, Volume 1

“....love and desire enjoy a symbiotic relationship, meaning that one cannot exist without the other. Desire is an enemy to contentment; desire is illness, a feverish brain. Who can be considered healthy who wants? The very word want suggests a lack, an impoverishment, and that is what desire is: an impoverishment of the brain, a flaw, a mistake.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“I pause to record that I feel in extraordinary form. Delirium perhaps.”
― Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

“I don't know. I had to be something, didn't I?”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Book of Dreams

“Everywhere he touches is fire. My whole body is burning up, the two of us becoming twin points of the same bright white flame.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“They haven't killed us yet," I say, and I imagine that one day I will fly a plane over Portland, over Rochester, over every fenced-in city in the whole country, and I will bomb and bomb and bomb, and watch all their buildings smoldering to dust, and all those people melting and bleeding into flame, and I will see how they like it.

If you take, we will take back. Steal from us, and we will rob you blind. When you squeeze, we will hit.

This is the way the world is made now.”
― Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“I like you.
You don't know me.
I want to, though.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“The most wonderful thing in life is to be delirious and the most wonderful kind of delirium is being in love. In the morning mist, hazy and amorous, London was delirious. London squinted as it floated along, milky pink, without caring where it was going.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin, Islanders & The Fisher of Men

“I know the rules. I've been living here longer than you have."
He cracks a smile then. He nudges me back. "Hardly."
"Born and raised. You're a transplant." I nudge him again, a little harder, and he laughs and tries to catch hold of my arm. I squirm away, giggling, and he stretches out to tickle my stomach. "Country bumpkin!" I squeal, as he grabs out and wrestles me back onto the blanket, laughing.
"City slicker," he says, rolling over on top of me, and then kisses me. Everything dissolves: heat, explosions of color, floating.”
― Lauren Oliver

“Is there a word for forgetting the name of someone when you want to introduce them to someone else at the same time you realize you've forgotten the name of the person you're introducing them to as well?"
"No.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 7: Brief Lives

“We'll walk together holding hands, and kiss in broad daylight, and love each other as much as we want to, and no one will ever try to keep up apart.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“An immense body, encircling my delirium, a body made of wind and sunlight, crouching and stretching, encompassed the existence of the slightest human echo.
”
― Joe Bousquet

“His eyes are the color of honey. These are the eyes I remember from my dreams.”
― Lauren Oliver

“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 out.
And then I decide I'm definitely dreaming, because as I'm watching, Alex starts peeling his shirt off over his head.”
― Lauren Oliver, Delirium

“When sleep puts an end to delirium, it is a good symptom.”
― Hippocrates, The Aphorisms of Hippocrates