Lauren DeStefano is an American young adult author. She is best known for the Chemical Garden series of novels and her gallows humor.
She smiles at our husband as she moves, and he blushes, overcome by her beauty. But I know what her smile really means. . . Her smile is her revenge.
Don't you miss it?" I say. "Being free. " He laughs.
You can try to please everyone and risk accomplishing nothing, or go for your dreams and risk pissing a few people off.
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.
What have you done? What have you given up?' So many things, Cecily. More than you know.
When I was 11 or 12, I was really bored with everything on my summer reading list. It was all happy, middle-grade kinds of books. I was getting frustrated, because I liked to read. My mother went to the library and got me a copy of 'The Other Side of Midnight' by Sidney Sheldon. It was my first adult book.
Life is much different from the days when there were lilies in my mother’s garden, and all my secrets fit into a paper cup.
Dystopian, by definition, promises a darker story.
Every star has been set in the sky. We mistakenly think they were put there for us.
Rhine. The river that, somewhere out there, has broken free.
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 she's brave. I think that nobody has ever believed what she could be capable of. All her life, nobody was listening.
It's never right to give up on someone.
She’s a commodity in a sea of broken girls.
Time was our very first king. We all live our lives to the aggressive ticking of the clock. We don't question that our lives are a grid of seconds; even our pulses oblige. No succeeding king can hope to hold this kind of power.
And everywhere girls, tumbling from trees like orange blossoms and hitting the earth with sickening thuds. They crack open.
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.
Real’ is a dirty word in this place.
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.
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.