“The hours here are flat and round, disks of gray layered one on top of...” — Lauren Oliver Quote

“The hours here are flat and round, disks of gray layered one on top of the other...they move slowly, at a grind, until it seems as though they are not moving at all. They are just pressing down...”

“Are you sure that being like everybody else will make you happy?”

“My parents were pretty liberal, but they were still parents. I definitely had my teenage rebellion.”

“Nothing has ever been so painful or delicious as being so close to him and being unable to do anything about it: like eating ice cream so fast on a hot day you get a splitting headache.”

“Finishing books - and leaving the world you've created - is always a kind of emotionally wrenching experience. I usually cry.”

“It was so strange, the way that life moved forward: the twists and the dead ends, the sudden opportunities. She supposed if you could predict or foresee everything that was going to happen, you’d lose the motivation to go through it all. The promise was always in the possibility.”

“A little consideration will reveal the absurdity of supposing that the present generation (if one can call ‘present’ that which is in the act of disappearing) or the generations of fifty or a hundred years hence can make a more real and valuable contribution to the human consciousness than those which existed fifty, a hundred or five thousand years ago. Our habit of breaking up time into the past, present and future does not entitle us to endow the last with more reality than the first. From the standpoint of the present, the future is no richer in reality than the past, and our efforts should be with reference, not to the future, but to that eternal present of which both future and past are one. The past has no existence except in our memory; the future is not yet, nor is it certain that it will be.”

“Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.”

“Still I promise myself, "Next time I will do better" in the all-too-human conceit that I will always be offered a "next time.”

“Greatness takes a lot of time.”

“Is the evidence of mastery an outlier output? And must it be celebrated by the masses by consensus to be considered mastery? Or can it be private? Internal? Known to only you? Both? Is a master a person or can a person master things or is the thing the masterpiece? And can there be more than one? Yes to all.”