Lauren DeStefano is an American young adult author. She is best known for the Chemical Garden series of novels and her gallows humor.
My head is my favorite swimming pool.
Tell me about yourself. " "Myself?" He looks confused. "Yes," I say, patting the mattress. "You know all there is to know," he says, sitting beside me. "Not true," I say. "Where were you born? What's your favourite season? Anything. " "Here. Florida," he says. "I remember a woman in a red dress with curly brown hair. Maybe she was my mother, I'm not sure. And summer. What about you?" The last part is said with a smile. He smiles so infrequently that I consider each one a trophy.
He says one word, nodding into the daylight. "Look. " It's an astounding word. It's a gift.
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.
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.
I never wanted to live forever," she says. "I just wanted enough time.
Tell freedom I said hello. ' 'If I happen to see it, I will.
We accept gods that don't speak to us. We accept gods that would place us in a world filled with injustices and do nothing as we struggle. It's easier than accepting that there's nothing out there at all, and that, in our darkest moments, we are truly alone.
Perhaps. . . you love too fiercely.
Everyone should remember being born. It doesn't seem fair that we only remember dying.
Poor kid,' Jenna says, and rolls her eyes toward me for a moment. Then she returns to her book. 'She doesn't even understand what kind of place this is.
You have a way of looking at things. You make it seem as though everything's going to be okay. I can't imagine a more dangerous thing to have than hope like yours.
I'm suddenly finding it hard to know the difference between nightmares and consciousness.
So how long do you think it’ll be?” he says. “Before the next hurricane comes along to take you home. ” “Can I tell you my biggest fear?” I say. “Yes. Tell me. ” “That it will be a very windless four years.
My worries always lead to dungeons; I can't imagine a worse thing than to be imprisoned for the rest of one's life, especially with so few years to enjoy what little there is.
The sullen boy sitting before me is not my husband, and the girl he is fretting over isn't me, will never be me.
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.
It's the silence I imagine in the rest of the world, the silence of an endless ocean and uninhabitable island, a silence that can be seen from space.
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.
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.