LAUREN OLIVER is the author of the teen novels Before I Fall and Panic and the Delirium trilogy: Delirium, Pandemonium, and Requiem, which have been translated into more than thirty languages and are New York Times and international bestselling novels. She is also the author of two novels for middle grade readers, The Spindlers and Liesl & Po, which was an E. B. White Read Aloud Award nominee. Lauren's novel Panic has been optioned for film by Universal Studios. A graduate of the University of Chicago and NYU's MFA program, Lauren Oliver is also the cofounder of the boutique literary development company Paper Lantern Lit.
You can visit her online at www.laurenoliverbooks.com.

DELIRIUM

LOVE: The deadliest of all deadly things. It kills you both when you have it and when you don't.

Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge. That's what it is: an edge; a razor. It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away on either side.

You know you can't be happy unless you're unhappy sometimes, right?

He who jumps may fall, but he may also fly.

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.

Snapshots, moments, mere seconds: as fragile and beautiful and hopeless as a single butterfly, flapping on against a gathering wind.

It's so strange how life works: You want something and you wait and wait and feel like it's taking forever to come. Then it happens and it's over and all you want to do is curl back up in that moment before things changed.

Waste today, want tomorrow...

Everyone you trust, everyone you think you can count on, will eventually disappoint you.

Rainstorms are incredible: falling shards of glass, the air full of diamonds.

Sometimes I feel as though there are two me's, one coasting directly on top of the other: The superficial me, who nods when she's supposed to nod and says what she's supposed to say, and some other, deeper part, the part that worries and dreams... Most of the time they move along in sync and I hardly notice the split, but sometimes it feels as though I'm two whole different people and I could rip apart at any second..

PANIC

When you love someone, when you care for someone, you have to do it through the good and the bad. Not just when you're happy and it's easy.

If you could predict or foresee very thing that was going to happen, you'd lose the motivation to go through it all.

The bravery was in moving forward, no matter what.

There was always light—beyond the dark, and the fear, out of the depths; there was sun to reach for, and air and space and freedom.