Before I Fall Quotes

“I guess that's what saying good-bye is always like--like jumping off an edge. The worst part is making the choice to do it. Once you're in the air, there's nothing you can do but let go.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“It's funny, isn't it? When you are young you just want to be old, and then later you wish you could go back to being a kid.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“Here's one of the things I learned that morning: if you cross a line and nothing happens, the line loses meaning. It's like that old riddle about a tree falling in a forest, and whether it makes a sound if there's no one around to hear it.

You keep drawing a line farther and farther away, crossing it every time. That's how people end up stepping off the edge of the earth. You'd be surprised at how easy it is to bust out of orbit, to spin out to a place where no one can touch you. To lose yourself--to get lost.

Or maybe you wouldn't be surprised. Maybe some of you already know.

To those people, I can only say: I'm sorry.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“How is it possible, I think, to change so much and not be able to change anything at all?”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“I used to think that's what love was: knowing someone so well he was like a part of you.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“This is what happens when you try to help people. You get screwed.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“It's not my fault I can't be like you, okay? I don't get up in the morning thinking the world is one big, shiny, happy place, okay? That's just not how I work. I don't think I can be fixed.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“i think of all the thousands of billions of steps and missteps and chances and coincidences that have brought me here. Brought you here, and it feels like the biggest miracle in the world.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“And it's the funniest thing: as soon as I see it, the whistling in my ears stops and the feeling of terror drains away, and I realize this whole time I haven't been falling at all. I've been floating.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“And now I realize Lindsay's not fearless. She's terrified. She's terrified that people will find out she's faking, bullshitting her way through life, pretending to have everything together when really she's just floundering like the rest of us. Lindsay, who will bite at you if you even look in her direction the wrong way, like on of those tiny attack dogs that are always barking and snapping in the air before they're jerked backward on the chains that keep them in one place.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“Hope keeps you alive.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“At a certain point your brain stops to rationalize things. At a certain point it gives up, shuts off, shuts down.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“It's the time of the night I like best, when most people are asleep and it feels like the world belongs completely to my friends and me, as though nothing exists apart from out little circle: everywhere else is darkness and quiet.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“Do the other kids make fun of you? For how you talk?'
'Sometimes.'
'So why don't you do something about it? You could learn to talk differently, you know.'
But this is my voice. How would you be able to tell when I was talking?”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“i feel like a curtain has dropped away and i'm seeing people for who they really are, different, and sharp, and unknowable.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“If singing were a feeling it would be this, this light, this lifting, like laughing...”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“You should only fall in love with people who will fall in love with you back.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“But before you start pointing fingers, let me ask you: is what I did really so bad? So bad I deserved to die? So bad I deserved to die like that?
Is what I did really so much worse than what anybody else does?
Is it really so much worse than what you do?
Think about it.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“I am falling, tumbling through the air, but this time the darkness is alive around me, full of beating things, and I realize that I'm not surrounded by dark but have only had my eyes closed all this time. I open them, feeling silly, and at the same time a hundred thousand butterlies take off around me, so many of them in so many brilliant colors they are like a solid rainbow, temporarily obscuring the sun. But as they wing higher and higher they reveal a landscape below us, all green and gold and sun-drenched fields and pink-tinged clouds drifting underneath me, and the air around me is clear and blue and sweet smelling, and I'm laughing, laughing, laughing as I spin through the air because, of course, I haven't been falling all the time.
I've been flying.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“But at the beginning of the night anything's possible.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“I started to think about time, and how it keeps moving and draining and flowing forever forward, seconds into minutes into days into years, all of it leading to the same place, a current running forever in one direction. And we're all going and swimming as fast as we can, helping it along.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“Nurses never tell you what they know. They’re hired for their cheeriness and the thickness of their hair. They need to look alive and healthy, to give the patients something to aim for.”
― Before I Fall, Jenny Downham

“It's too late,' she says.
And I say 'It's never too late.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“Maybe we can afford to wait. Maybe for you there's a tomorrow. Maybe for you there's one thousand tomorrows, or three thousand, or ten, so much time you can bathe in it, roll around in it, let it slide like coins through your fingers. So much time you can waste it.
But for some of us there's only today. And the truth is, you never really know.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“I keep quiet and look out the window. The light is weak and watery-looking, like the sun hast just spilled itself over the horizon and is too lazy to clean itself up. The shadows are as sharp and pointed as needles. I watch three black crows take off simultaneausly from a telephone wire and wish I could take off too, move up, up, up, and watch the ground drop away from me the way it does when you're on an airplane, folding and compressing into itself like an origami figure, until everything is flat and brightly colored - until the world is like a drawing of itself”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“It's weird how much people change. [...] It's kind of sad, if you think about it. Like there's no continuity in people at all. Like something ruptures when you hit twelve, or thirteen, or whatever the age is when you're no longer a kid but a "young adult," and after that you're a totally different person. Maybe even a less happy person. Maybe even a worse one.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“If you're ever wishing for things to go back to the way they were. You just have to look up”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“Is what I did really so bad? So bad I deserve to die? So bad I deserved to die like that?
I what I did really so much worse than waht anybody else does?
Is it really so much worse than what you do?
Think about it.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“It's weird how much people change...It's kind of sad, if you think about it. Like there's no continuity in people at all. Like something ruptures when you hit twelve, or thirteen, or whatever the age is when you're no longer a kid but a "young adult", and after that you're a totally different person. Maybe even a less happy person. Maybe even a worse one.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall

“She said that the reason you can never go home again - we were studying a list of famous quotes and discussing their meaning, and that was one of them, by Thomas Wolfe, "You can't go home again"- isn't necessarily that places change, but that people do. So nothing ever looks the same.”
― Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall