{"quotes":[{"text":"I feel as though I’m in a dream, where strange things are happening but they don’t feel strange. Everything is cloudy—everything is wrapped in a fog—and I’m filled from head to toe with the single, burning desire to get closer to the music, to hear the music better, for the music to go on and on and on.","author":"Lauren Oliver","tags":["cloudy","delirium-trilogy","hana-tate","lena-haloway","music"],"id":20697,"author_id":"Lauren+Oliver"},{"text":"Is it true?” I ask him.“Is what true?” His eyes are the color of honey. These are the eyes I remember from my dreams.“That you still love me,” I say, breathless. “I need to know.”Alex nods. He reaches out and touches my face—barely skimming my cheekbone and brushing away a bit of my hair. “It’s true.”“But . . . I’ve changed,” I say. “And you’ve changed.”“That’s true too,” he says quietly. I look at the scar on his face, stretching from his left eye to his jawline, and something hitches in my chest.“So what now?” I ask him. The light is too bright; the day feels as though it’s merging into dream.“Do you love me?” Alex asks. And I could cry; I could press my face into his chest and breathe in, and pretend that nothing has changed, that everything will be perfect and whole and healed again.But I can’t. I know I can’t.“I never stopped.” I look away from him. I look at Grace, and the high grass littered with the wounded and the dead. I think of Julian, and his clear blue eyes, his patience and goodness. I think of all the fighting we’ve done, and all the fighting we have yet to do. I take a deep breath. “But it’s more complicated than that.”Alex reaches out and places his hands on my shoulders. “I’m not going to run away again,” he says.“I don’t want you to,” I tell him.His fingers find my cheek, and I rest for a second against his palm, letting the pain of the past few months flow out of me, letting him turn my head toward his. Then he bends down and kisses me: light and perfect, his lips just barely meeting mine, a kiss that promises renewal.","author":"Lauren Oliver","tags":["alex-sheathes","changed","intimate","kiss","lena-haloway","love","true"],"id":25491,"author_id":"Lauren+Oliver"},{"text":"You can’t cheat if there are no rules.","author":"Lauren Oliver","tags":["alex-warren","alex-warren-sheathes","cheat","delirium-trilogy","games","lena-haloway","rules"],"id":33534,"author_id":"Lauren+Oliver"},{"text":"I wish I could close my eyes and be blown into dust and nothingness, feel all my thoughts disperse like dandelion fluff drifting off on the wind.","author":"Lauren Oliver","tags":["blown","dandelion","delirium-trilogy","disperse","lena-haloway","nothingness","thoughts"],"id":182277,"author_id":"Lauren+Oliver"},{"text":"It’s for the best. But no matter how many times I repeat it, the strange, hollow feeling in my stomach doesn’t go away. And ridiculous as it is, I can’t shake the persistent, needling feeling that I’ve forgotten something, or missed something, or lost something forever.","author":"Lauren Oliver","tags":["alex-warren","confusion","emptiness","feeling","hana-tate","hollow","lena-haloway","lost"],"id":186100,"author_id":"Lauren+Oliver"},{"text":"I came to find you last night,' Lena says more quietly. 'When I knew there was going to be a raid...I snuck out. I was there when—when the regulators came. I barely made it out. Alex helped me. We hid in a shed until they were gone...'I close my eyes and reopen them. I remember wiggling into the damp earth, bumping my hip against the window. I remember standing, and seeing the dark forms of bodies lying like shadows in the grass, and the sharp geometry of a small she shed, nestled in the trees.Lena was there. It was almost unimaginable.'I can't believe that. I can't believe you snuck out during a raid—for me.' My throat feels thick again, and I will myself not to start crying. For a moment I am overwhelmed by a feeling so huge and strange, I have no name for it: It surges over the guilt and the shock and the envy; it plunges a hand into the deepest part of myself and roots me to Lena.","author":"Lauren Oliver","tags":["feeling","hana-tate","help","lena-haloway","raid","save","shed","snuck-out"],"id":203340,"author_id":"Lauren+Oliver"},{"text":"As soon as she sees me she swings forward and hits a key on her keyboard. The music cuts off instantly. Strangely, the silence that follows seems just as loud.","author":"Lauren Oliver","tags":["delirium-trilogy","hana-tate","lena-haloway","loud","music","silence","strange"],"id":209223,"author_id":"Lauren+Oliver"},{"text":"I tear down Baxter, which loops around the last mile down to Back Cove.And then I stop short. The buildings have fallen away behind me, giving way to ramshackle sheds, sparsely situated on either side of the cracked and run-down road. Beyond that, a short strip of tall, weedy grass slants down toward the cove.The water is an enormous mirror, tipped with pink and gold from the sky. In that single, blazing moment as I come around the bend, the sun—curved over the dip of the horizon like a solid gold archway—lets out its final winking rays of light, shattering the darkness of the water, turning everything white for a fraction of a second, and then falls away, sinking, dragging the pink and the red and the purple out of the sky with it, all the color bleeding away instantly and leaving only dark.Alex was right. It was gorgeous—one of the best I’ve ever seen.","author":"Lauren Oliver","tags":["alex-warren","delirium-trilogy","lena-haloway","sky","sun","sunset"],"id":209866,"author_id":"Lauren+Oliver"},{"text":"You’re angry at me,” she says.I stop crying at once. My whole body goes cold and still. She squats down beside me, and even though I’m careful not to look up, not to look at her at all, I can feel her, can smell the sweat from her skin and hear the ragged pattern of her breathing.“You’re angry at me,” she repeats, and her voice hitches a little. “You think I don’t care.”Her voice is the same. For years I used to imagine that voice lilting over those forbidden words: I love you. Remember. They cannot take it. Her last words to me before she went away.She shuffles forward and squats next to me. She hesitates, then reaches out and places her palm against my cheek, and turns my head toward hers so I’m forced to look at her. I can feel the calluses on her fingers.In her eyes, I see myself reflected in miniature, and I tunnel back to a time before she left, before I believed she was gone forever, when her eyes welcomed me into every day and shepherded me, every night, into sleep.“You turned out even more beautiful than I’d imagined,” she whispers. She, too, is crying.The hard casement inside me breaks.“Why?” is the only word that comes. Without intending to or even thinking about it, I allow her to draw me against her chest, let her wrap her arms around me. I cry into the space between her collarbones, inhaling the still-familiar smell of her skin.There are so many things I need to ask her: What happened to you in the Crypts? How could you let them take you away? Where did you go? But all I can say is: “Why didn’t you come for me? After all those years—all that time—why didn’t you come?” Then I can’t speak at all; my sobs become shudders.“Shhh.” She presses her lips to my forehead, strokes my hair, just like she used to when I was a child. I am a baby once again in her arms—helpless and needy. “I’m here now.”She rubs my back while I cry. Slowly, I feel the darkness drain out of me, as though pulled away by the motion of her hand. Finally I can breathe again. My eyes are burning, and my throat feels raw and sore. I draw away from her, wiping my eyes with the heel of my hand, not even caring that my nose is running. I’m suddenly exhausted—too tired to be hurt, too tired to be angry. I want to sleep, and sleep.“I never stopped thinking about you,” my mother says. “I thought of you every day—you and Rachel.","author":"Lauren Oliver","tags":["angry","annabelle","care","comfort","crying","lena-haloway","why"],"id":213705,"author_id":"Lauren+Oliver"},{"text":"Hana?' Lena says softly. 'Are you okay?'That single stupid question breaks me. All the metal fingers relax me at once, and the tears they've been holding back come surging up at once. Suddenly I am sobbing and telling her everything: about the raid, and the dogs, and the sounds of skulls cracking underneath regulator's nightsticks. Thinking about it again makes me feel like I might puke. At a certain point, Lena puts her arms around me and starts murmuring things into my hair. I don't even know what she's saying, and I don't care. JUst having her here—solid, real, on my side—makes me feel better than I have in weeks. Slowly I manage to stop crying, swallowing back the hiccups and sobs that are still running through me. I try to tell her that I've missed her, and that I've been stupid and wrong, but my voice is muffled and thick.","author":"Lauren Oliver","tags":["better","comfort","concerned","cry","friend","hana-tate","lena-haloway","sob"],"id":279332,"author_id":"Lauren+Oliver"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":17,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}