As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.

I'm in love with you," he said quietly."Augustus," I said."I am," he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you.

Some people don't understand the promises they're making when they make them," I said."Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That's what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway.

NO. No no no. I don't want to screw you. I just love you. When did who you want to screw become the whole game? Since when is the person you want to screw the only person you get to love? It's so stupid, Tiny! I mean, Jesus, who even gives a fuck about sex?! People act like it's the most important thing humans do, but come on. How can our sentient fucking lives revolve around something slugs can do. I mean, who you want to screw and whether you screw them? Those are important questions, I guess. But they're not that important. You know what's important? Who would you die for? Who do you wake up at five forty-five in the morning for even though you don't even know why he needs you? Whose drunken nose would you pick?!

I'll fight it. I'll fight it for you. Don't you worry about me, Hazel Grace. I'm okay. I'll find a way to hang around and annoy you for a long time.

I was blind and heart broken and didn't want to do anything and Gus burst into my room and shouted, "I have wonderful news!" And I was like, "I don't really want to hear wonderful news right now," and Gus said, "This is wonderful news you want to hear," and I asked him, "Fine, what is it?" and he said, "You are going to live a good and long life filled with great and terrible moments that you cannot even imagine yet!

Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will

I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.

Augustus," I said. "Really. You don't have to do this.""Sure I do," he said. "I found my Wish.""God, you're the best," I told him."I bet you say that to all the boys who finance your international travel," he answered.

Sometimes people don’t understandthe promises they’re making when they make them,” I said.Isaac shot me a look. “Right, of course.But you keep the promise anyway. That’swhat love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don’t you believe in true love?

I'm sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to.

I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things.

Love is keeping the promise anyway.

The feeling of loving her and being loved by her welled up in him, and he could taste the adrenaline in the back of his throat, and maybe it wasn't over, and maybe he could feel her hand in his again and hear her loud, brash voice contort itself into a whisper to say I-love-you as if it were a secret, and an immense one.

He shook his head, just looking at me. - "What?" I asked.- "Nothing" he said.- "Why are you looking at me like that?"Augustus half smiled. "Because you`re beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence." A brief awkward silence ensued. Augustus plowed through: "I mean, particularly given that, as you so deliciously pointed out, all of this will end in oblivion and everything."I kind of scoffed or sighed or exhaled in a way that was vaguely coughy and then said, "I`m not beau-"- "You are like a millennial Natalie Portman. Like V for Vendetta Natalie Portman."- "Never seen it."- "Really?" he asked. "Pixie-haired gorgeous girl dislikes authority and can`t help but fall for a boy she knows is trouble. It`s your autobiography, so far as I can tell."His every syllable flirted. Honestly, he kind of turned me on. I didn`t even know that guys could turn me on - not, like, in real life.

We were very different, and we disagreed about a lot of things, but he was always so interesting, you know?

Maybe 'Okay' will be our 'always'...

Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.

The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.

There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.

Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.

When things break, it's not the actual breaking that prevents them from getting back together again. It's because a little piece gets lost - the two remaining ends couldn't fit together even if they wanted to. The whole shape has changed.

You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

One swing set, well worn but structurally sound, seeks new home. Make memories with your kid or kids so that someday he or she or they will look into the backyard and feel the ache of sentimentality as desperately as I did this afternoon. It's all fragile and fleeting, dear reader, but with this swing set, your child(ren) will be introduced to the ups and downs of human life gently and safely, and may also learn the most important lesson of all: No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can't go all the way around.

You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.

There were five others before they got to him. He smiled a little when his turn came. His voice was low, smoky, and dead sexy. “My name is Augustus Waters,” he said. “I’m seventeen. I had a little touch of osteosarcoma a year and a half ago, but I’m just here today at Isaac’s request.”“And how are you feeling?” asked Patrick.“Oh, I’m grand.” Augustus Waters smiled with a corner of his mouth. “I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend.

At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze.

There was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that’s one in five . . . so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.

If you don't live a life in service of a greater good, you've gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won't get either a life or a death that means anything.

Me: “I refuse to attend Support Group.”Mom: “One of the symptoms of depression is disinterest in activities.”Me: “Please just let me watch America’s Next Top Model. It’s an activity.”Mom: “Television is a passivity.”Me: “Ugh, Mom, please.”Mom: “Hazel, you’re a teenager. You’re not a little kid anymore. You need to make friends, get out of the house, and live your life.”Me: “If you want me to be a teenager, don’t send me to Support Group. Buy me a fake ID so I can go to clubs, drink vodka, and take pot.”Mom: “You don’t take pot, for starters.”Me: “See, that’s the kind of thing I’d know if you got me a fake ID.”Mom: “You’re going to Support Group.”Me: “UGGGGGGGGGGGGG.”Mom: “Hazel, you deserve a life.

Do you know what your problem is? You can't live with the idea that someone might leave.

I came here looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends and a more-than-minor life..

Do you ever wonder whether people would like you more or less if they could see inside you? But I always wonder about that. If people could see me the way I see myself—if they could live in my memories—would anyone, anyone, love me?

I don't know how I look, but I know how I feel: Young. Goofy. Infinite.

I always had this idea that you should never give up a happy middle in the hopes of a happy ending, because there is no such thing as a happy ending. Do you know what I mean? There is so much to lose.

I just want to do something that matters. Or be something that matters. I just want to matter.

I liked being a person. I wanted to keep at it.

I must talk, and you must listen, for we are engaged here in the most important pursuit in history: the search for meaning. What is the nature of being a person? What is the best way to go about being a person? How did we come to be, and what will become of us when we are no longer? In short: What are the rules of this game, and how might we best play it?

I always felt like you had to be important to have enemies.

Life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future.

What about the rest of your life?"She shrugged. "What about it?""Aren't you worried about, like, forever?""Forever is composed of nows," she says.

It is worth it to leave behing my minor life for grander maybes-Miles "Pudge

Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.

I figured something out. The future is unpredictable.

The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention.

There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow- that, in short, we are all going.

I was born into Bolívar's labyrinth, and so I must believe in the hope of Rabelais' Great Perhaps.

Islam and Christianity promise eternal paradise to the faithful. And that is a powerful opiate, certainly, the hope of a better life to come. But there's a Sufi story that challenges the notion that people believe only because they need an opiate. Rabe'a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seem running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, 'I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven of fear of hell, but because He is God.

Saying 'I notice you're a nerd' is like saying, 'Hey, I notice that you'd rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you'd rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan. Why is that?' In fact, it seems to me that most contemporary insults are pretty lame. Even 'lame' is kind of lame. Saying 'You're lame' is like saying 'You walk with a limp.' Yeah, whatever, so does 50 Cent, and he's done all right for himself.

What the hell is that?" I laughed."It's my fox hat.""Your fox hat?""Yeah, Pudge. My fox hat.""Why are you wearing your fox hat?" I asked."Because no one can catch the motherfucking fox.

Headline?" he asked."'Swing Set Needs Home,'" I said."'Desperately Lonely Swing Set Needs Loving Home,'" he said."'Lonely, Vaguely Pedophilic Swing Set Seeks the Butts of Children,'" I said.

As long as we don't die, this is gonna be one hell of a story.

I told Augustus the broad outline of my miracle: diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer when I was thirteen. (I didn’t tell him that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You’re a woman. Now die.)

Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.

Look, let me just say it: He was hot. A nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy . . . well.

The Colonel led all the cheers.Cornbread!" he screamed.CHICKEN!" the crowd responded.Rice!"PEAS!"And then, all together: "WE GOT HIGHER SATs."Hip Hip Hip Hooray!" the Colonel cried.YOU'LL BE WORKIN' FOR US SOMEDAY!

I hated sports. I hated sports, and I hated people who played them, and I hated people who watched them, and I hated people who didn't hate people who watched or played them.

Well, while you were in the bathroom, I sat down at this picnic table here in Bumblefug, Kentucky, and noticed that someone had carved that GOD HATES FAG, which, aside from being a grammatical nightmare, is absolutely ridiculous. So I'm changing it to 'God Hates Baguettes.' It's tough to disagree with that. Everybody hates baguettes.

Just move to the Internet, its great here. We get to live inside where the weather is always awesome.

Just deleting vandalism on the Chuck Norris page," Radar said. "For instance, while I do think that Chuck Norris specializes in the roundhouse kick, I don't think it's accurate to say, 'Chuck Norris's tears can cure cancer, but unfortunately he has never cried.

Dude, I don’t want to talk about Lacey’s prom shoes. And I’ll tell you why: I have this thing that makes me really uninterested in prom shoes. It’s called a penis.

We fatties have a bond, dude. It's like a secret society. We got all kinds of shit you don't know about. Handshakes, special fat people dances-we got these secret fugging lairs in the center of the earth and we go down there in the middle of the night when all the skinny kids are sleeping and eat cake and friend chicken and shit. Why d'you think Hollis is still sleeping, kafir? Because we were up all night in the secret lair injecting butter frosting into our veins. ...A fatty trusts another fatty.

Every year, many, many stupid people graduate from college. And if they can do it, so can you.

As far as I can tell, there are two basic (kissing) rules: 1. Don't bite anything without permission. 2. The human tongue is like wasabi: it's very powerful, and should be used sparingly.

Getting you a date to prom is so hard that the hypothetical idea itself is actually used to cut diamonds," I added. Radar tapped a locker twice with his fist to show his approval, and then came back with another. "Ben, getting you a date to prom is so hard that the American government believes the problem cannot be solved with diplomacy, but will instead require force.

Principled hate is a hell of a lot stronger than "Boy, I wish you hadn't mummified me and thrown me into the lake" hate.

The food was so good that with each passing course, our conversation devolved further into fragmented celebrations of its deliciousness:'I want this dragon carrot risotto to become a person so I can take it to Las Vegas and marry it.

I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr.

He specialized in the murder of dreams, Hazel Grace...

Dear Teens at Starbucks wearing 'Abstain from Sex 2 Attain Ur Goals' t-shirts: Doesn't it depend on what my goals are?

But I was not in the band, because I suffer from the kind of tone deafness that is generally associated with actual deafness

You just gotta tell her, man,’ I said. ‘You just gotta say, “Angela, I really like you, but there’s something you need to know: when we go to my house and hook up, we’ll be watched by the twenty-four hundred eyes of twelve hundred black Santas.

Something about telling that story made my gut grow back together."What?"Oh, nothing. Just thinking out loud."That's who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of."The people who've been in your secret hiding places."The people you bite your thumb in front of."Hi."Hi."..."..."Wow. My first Lindsey."My second Colin."That was fun. Let's try it again."Sold."..."..."..."...

Chuck Parson did not participate in organized sports, because to do so would distract from his larger goal of his life: to one day be convicted of murder

She said, "It's not life or death, the labyrinth.""Um, okay. So what is it?""Suffering," she said. "Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That's the problem. Bolivar was talking about the pain, not about the living or dying. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?... Nothing's wrong. But there's always suffering, Pudge. Homework or malaria or having a boyfriend who lives far away when there's a good-looking boy lying next to you. Suffering is universal. It's the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about.

Imagine others complexly.

Ben, if you get pee in my brand-new car, I am going to cut your balls off."Still peeing, Ben looks over at me smirking. "You´re gonna need a hell of a big knife, bro.

The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.

All along — not only since she left, but for a decade before — I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as a poor a window as I did. And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel fear, who could feel isolated in a roomful of people, who could be shy about her record collection because it was too personal to share. Someone who might have read travel books to escape having to live in the town that so many people escape to. Someone who — because no one thought she was a person — had no one to really talk to.

Rabe'a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seen running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, 'I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.

Suffering can bend & break us. But it can also break us open to become the persons God intended us to be. It depends on what we do with the pain. If we offer it back to God, He will use it to do great things in us & through us, because suffering is fertile... it an grow new life.

he is both the source of my happiness and the one i want to share it with. i have to believe that’s a sign.

Nerd girls are the world’s most underutilized romantic resource. And guys, do not tell me that nerd girls are not hot because that shows a Paris Hilton-esque failure to understand hotness.

We all romanticize the people we adore.

If you want the rainbow, you have to deal with the rain.

I’m in love with you, and I’m not in thebusiness of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returnedto dust, and I know the sun will swallowthe only earth we’ll ever have, and I amin love with you.

No, I don’t think you’re gonna be single forever, and also I don’t understand your obsession with romantic love. There are other ways to have fulfilling relationships that can sustain you and make your life great and fun other than having a sexualized relationship. It’s not the only kind of fulfilling human interaction. So, even if you are single forever, that doesn’t mean that you’ve had some kind of failed life.

Not to sound like a jerk, but Jane isn't really my type. Her hair's kinda disastrously curly and she mostly hangs out with guys. My type's a little girlier. And honestly, I don't even like my type of girl that much, let alone other types. Not that I'm asexual or something - I just find Romance Drama unbearable.

Keeping the box closed just keeps you in the dark, not the universe... but failing to open the box doesn't kill the cat.

We need never be hopeless because we can never be irreperably broken.

We need never be without hope because we can never be irreparably broken.

I believe in hope, in what is something called ”radical hope.” I believe there is hope for all of us, even amid the suffering. And that’s why I write fiction, probaby. It’s my attempt to keep that fragile strand of radical hope, to buld a fire in the darkness.r

I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and towards the end, his wife started crying and screaming, "I want to go too! I want to go too!" And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: "We are all going.

Because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.

I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can't due to deadness.

I will not tell you our love story, because-like all real love stories-it will die with us,as it should.

Hazel has to realize that her mom was wrong when she said, “I won’t be a mother anymore.” The truth is, after Hazel dies (assuming she dies), her mom will still be her mom, just as my grandmother is still my grandmother even though she has died. As long as either person is still alive, that relationship survives. (It changes, but it survives.)

You can't just make yourself matter and then die, Alaska, because now I am irretrievably different, and I'm sorry I let you go, yes, but you made the choice. You left me Perhapsless, stuck in your goddamned labyrinth. And now I don't even know if you chose the straight and fast way out, if you left me like this on purpose. And so I never knew you, did I? I can't remember, because I never knew.

I didn't tell him that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You're a woman. Now die.

It was an indulgence, learning last words. Other people had chocolate; I had dying declarations.

Nineteenth-century preacher Henry Ward Beecher's last words were "Now comes the mystery." The poet Dylan Thomas, who liked a good drink at least as much as Alaska, said, "I've had eighteen straight whiskeys. I do believe that's a record," before dying. Alaska's favorite was playwright Eugene O'Neill: "Born in a hotel room, and--God damn it--died in a hotel room." Even car-accident victims sometimes have time for last words. Princess Diana said, "Oh God. What's happened?" Movie star James Dean said, "They've got to see us," just before slamming his Porsche into another car. I know so many last words. But I will never know hers.

The thing about dead people... The thing is you sound like a bastard if you don't romanticize them, but the truth is... complicated, I guess.

I was caught in a love triangle with one dead side.

Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I dont want us to forget Alaska, and I don't want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we're trying to und3erstand how people answered that question and the question each of you posed in your papers--how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called 'people's rotten lots in life.

Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.

I went on spouting bullshit Encouragements as Gus's parents, arm in arm, hugged each other and nodded at every word. Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.

But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska's genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed

Right, well, he'd been sick for a while and his nurse said to him, 'You seem to be feeling better this morning,' and Isben looked at her and said, 'On the contrary,' and then he died.

And then I crawled into his unmade bed, wrapping myself in his comforter like a cocoon, surrounding myself with his smell. I took out my cannula so I could smell better, breathing him and out, the scent fading even as I lay there, my chest burning until I couldn't distinguish among the pains.

I don't care if the New York Times writes an obituary for me. I just want you to write one. ... You say you're not special because the world doesn't know about you, but that's an insult to me. I know about you.

You can't just make me different and then leave

When she fucked up all those years ago, just a little girl terrified into paralysis, she fell onto the enigma of herself.

Colder by the hour, more dead with every breath.

Last words are always harder to remember when no one knows that someone's about to die.

What I love about the sculpture is that it makes the bones that we are always walking and playing on manifest, like in a world that so often denies the reality of death and the reality that we are surrounded by and outnumbered by the dead. Here, is a very playful way of acknowledging that and acknowledging that and that always, whenever we play, whenever we live, we are living in both literal and metaphorical ways on the memory and bones of the dead.

She cannot possibly be dead, people do not just die

Oh God, Alaska, I love you. I love you," and the Colonel whispered, "I'm so sorry, Pudge. I know you did," and I said, "No. Not past tense." She wasn't even a person anymore, just flesh rotting, but I loved her present tense.

The times that were most fun seemed always to be followed by sadness now, because it was when life started to feel like it did when she was with us that we realized how utterly gone she was.

Like many people, I feel like celebrating. Remember this feeling. It is human, and can help us understand when others express bloodlust.

I looked over at Augustus Waters, who looked back at me. You could almost see through his eyes they were so blue. "There will come a time," I said, "when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed for that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you.

Like they just wanted to enjoy The Gus Waters Show while it was still in town.

Losing you're co-remember meant losing the memory itself.

He'd fought hard, Lida told me, as if there was another way to fight.

He was a dying man looking down on the surgeons trying to save him.

If people were rain, I'd be a drizzle and she'd be a hurricane.

The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive

Poetry is just so emo." he said. "Oh, the pain. The pain. It always rains. In my soul.

So dawn goes down today... Nothing gold can stay.-- Robert Frost

Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don't want to make eye contact while doing it.", Nerdfighteria Wiki, January 17, 2012]

The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That's actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.

What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable? How very odd, to believe God gave you life, and yet not think that life asks more of you than watching TV.

People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn't bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to.

I was not religious, but I liked rituals. I liked the idea of connecting an action with remembering.

There is no try. There is only do.

Maybe its like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And then things happen - these people leave us, or don’t love us, or don’t get us, or we don’t get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack in places. And I mean, yeah once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable. Once it starts to rain inside the Osprey, it will never be remodeled. But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And its only that time that we see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. When did we see each other face to face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade, but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.

And then the line was quite but not dead. I almost felt like he was there in my room with me, but in a way it was better, like I was not in my room and he was not in his, but instead we were together in some invisible and tenuous third space that could only be visited on the phone.

Why don’t we break up? I guess I stay with her because she stays with me. And that’s not an easy thing to do.

It's easy to like someone from a distance. But when she stopped being this amazing unattainable thing or whatever, and started being, like, just a regular girl with a weird relationship with food and frequent crankiness wh's kind of bossy--then I had to basically start liking a whole different person.

You know your problem, Quentin? You keep expecting people not to be themselves.

That’s always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people would want to be around someone because they’re pretty. It’s like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste.

Uh-uh, dude. I tried it your way with the dating and the girls and the kissing and the drama, and man, I didn't like it. Plus, my best friend is a walking cautionary tale of what happens to you when romantic relationships don't involve marriage. Like you always say, kafir, everything ends in breakup, divorce, or death. I want to narrow my misery options to divorce or death - that's all.

You know what's lame, Pudge? I really care about her. I mean, we were hopeless. Badly matched. But still. I mean, I said I loved her... I mean, it's stupid to miss someone you didn't even get along with. but I don't know, it was nice, you know, having someone you could always fight with.

I wouldn't have cared if my girlfriend was a Jaguar-driving Cyclops with a beard - I'd have been grateful just to have someone to make out with.

One swing set, well worn but structurally sound, seeks new home ... With this swing set, your child(ren) will be introduced to the ups and downs of human life gently and safely, and may also learn the most important lesson of all: No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can't go all the way around.

There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow-that, in short, we are all going

I'd had nearly four years of experience looking at these clocks, but their sluggishness never ceased to surprise. If I am ever told that I have one day to live, I will head straight to the hallowed halls of Winter Park High School, where a day has been known to last a thousand years.

What a slut time is. She screws with everybody.

What a slut time is. She screws everybody...

I spent the next three hours in classrooms, trying not to look at the clocks over various blackboards, and then looking at the clocks, and then being amazed that only a few minutes had passed since I last looked at the clocks, but their sluggishness never ceased to surprise. If I am ever told that I have one day to live, I will head straight for the hallowed halls of Winter Park High School, where a day has been known to last a thousand years.

They love their hair because they're not smart enough to love something more interesting.

It's not because I want to make out with her."Hold on." He grabbed a pencil and scrawled excitedly at the paper as if he'd just made a mathematical breakthrough and then looked back up at me. "I just did some calculations, and I've been able to determine that you're full of shit

Harry Potter isn’t real? Oh no! Wait, wait, what do you mean by real? Is this video blog real? Am I real if you can see me and hear me, but only through the internet? Are you real if I can read your comment but I don’t know who you are or what your name is or where you’re from or what you look like or how old you are? I know all of those things about Harry Potter. Maybe Harry Potter’s real and you’re not.

She's cute, I thought, but you don't need to like a girl who treats you like you're ten: You've already got a mom.

We were kissing.I thought: This is good.I thought: I am not bad at this kissing. Not bad at all.I thought: I am clearly the greatest kisser in the history of the universe.Suddenly she laughed and pulled away from me. She wiggled a hand out of her sleeping bag and wiped her face. "You slobbered on my nose," she said, and laughed

There are times when it is appropriate, even preferable, to get an erection when someone's face is in close proximity to your penis.This was not one of those times.

You will not kill my girlfriend today, International Terrorists of Ambiguous Nationality!

He flipped himself onto his side and kissed me. "You're so hot," I said, my hand still on his leg. "I'm starting to think you have an amputee fetish," he answered, still kissing me. I laughed."I have an Augustus Waters fetish," I explained.

I wish I knew how to quit you, Tumblr.

I can't go to Amsterdam. One of my doctors thinks it's a bad idea."He was quiet for a second. "God," he said. "I should've just paid for it myself. Should've just taken you straight from the Funky Bones to Amsterdam.""But then I would've had a probably fatal episode of deoxygenation in Amsterdam, and my body would have been shipped home in the cargo hold of an airplane," I said. "Well, yeah," he said. "But before that, my grand romantic gesture would have totally gotten me laid."I laughed pretty hard, hard enought that I felt where the chest tube had been. "You laugh because it's true," he said.I laughed again."It's true, isn't it!" "Probably not," I said, and then after a moment added, "although you never know.

He’s not that smart.”“She’s right,” Augustus says. “It’s just that most really good-looking people are stupid, so I exceed expectations.”“Right, it’s primarily his hotness.”“It can be sort of blinding,” he said.“It actually did blind our friend Isaac.”“Terrible tragedy, that. But can I help my own deadly beauty?”“You cannot.”“It is my burden, this beautiful face.”“Not to mention your body.”“Seriously, don’t even get me started on my hot bod. You don’t want to see me naked, Dave. Seeing me naked actually took Hazel Grace’s breath away,” he said, nodding toward the oxygen tank.

Nerd life is just so much better than regular life.

pg. 231-232: They'd given me a minivan. They could have picked any car and they picked a minivan. A minivan. O God of the Vehicular Justice, why dost thou mock me? Minivan, you albatross around my neck! You mark of Cain! You wretched beast high ceilings and few horsepower!

You were with Margo Roth Spiegelman last night? At THREE A.M.? I nodded. Alone? I nodded. Oh my God, if you hooked up with her, you have to tell me every single thing that happened. You have to write me a term paper on the look and feel of Margo Roth Spiegelman's breasts. Thrity pages, minimum! I want you to do a photo-realistic pencil drawing. A sculpture would also be acceptable. I was wondering if it would be possible for you to write a sestina about Margo Roth Spiegelman's breasts? Your six words are: pink, round, firmness, succulent, supple, and pillowy. Personally, I think at least one of the words should be buhbuhbuhbuh.

Was it animal pee or human pee? Someone asked.How would I know? What, am I an expert in the study of pee?

No headboards were broken.

Daddy is trying really fugging hard to think of a not-terrifying reason why you'd wake Daddy up in the middle of the night to ask that fugging question. But no. No. Daddy does not have a match or a lighter.

Cover me!' Augustus said as he jumped out from behind the wall and raced toward the school. Isaac fumbled for his controller and thenstarted firing while the bullets rained down on Augustus, who was shot once and then twice but still ran, Augustus shouting,'YOU CAN’T KILL MAX MAYHEM!' and with a final flurry of button combinations, he dove onto the grenade, which detonated beneath him. His dismembered body exploded like a geyser and the screen went red. A throaty voice said, 'MISSION FAILURE,' but Augustus seemed to think otherwise as he smiled at his remnants on the screen. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a cigarette, and shoved it between his teeth.'Saved the kids' he said.'Temporarily' I pointed out.'All salvation is temporary' Augustus shot back. 'I bought them a minute. Maybe that’s the minute that buys them an hour, which is the hour that buys them a year. No one’s gonna buy them forever, Hazel Grace, but my life bought them a minute. And that’s not nothing.

I'm telling you, Augustus Waters talked so much that he'd interrupt you at his own funeral.

Well," Ben went on,"someone should just tell her to come on home, because she can find the world's largest balls right here in Orlando, Florida. They're located in a special display case known as 'my scrotum.'" Radar laughed, and Ben continued. "I mean seriously. My balls are so big that when you order french fries from McDonald's, you can choose one of four sizes: small, medium,large, and my balls.

Ma'am,' Augustus said, nodding toward her, 'your daughter's car has just been deservedly egged by a blind man. Please close the door and go back inside or we'll be forced to call the police.' After wavering for a moment, Monica's mom closed the door and disappeared.

The pigs can't stop the fox; I'm too quick,' Takumi said to himself. "I can rhyme while I run; I'm that slick.

This one's for Alaska Young!

AHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!' he screamed.'So that's Sara,' I said.'Yes.''She seems nice.

We were kissing.I thought: This is good.I thought: I am not bad at this kissing. Not bad at all.I thought: I am clearly the greatest kisser in the history of the universe.Suddenly she laughed and pulled away from me. She wiggled a hand out of her sleeping bag and wiped her face. "You slobbered on my nose," she said, and laughed.

Everything that comes together falls apart. Everything. The chair I’m sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I’m gonna fall apart, probably before this chair. And you’re gonna fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you you—they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart. The Buddha knew one thing science didn’t prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart.

Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.

Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever pay attention to them and they always love you back.

Books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.

Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like betrayal

Have you really read all those books in your room?”Alaska laughing- “Oh God no. I’ve maybe read a third of ‘em. But I’m going to read them all. I call it my Life’s Library. Every summer since I was little, I’ve gone to garage sales and bought all the books that looked interesting. So I always have something to read.

He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

I hadn’t been in proper school in three years. My parents were my two best friends. My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed.

Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.

Adult librarians are like lazy bakers: their patrons want a jelly doughnut, so they give them a jelly doughnut. Children’s librarians are ambitious bakers: 'You like the jelly doughnut? I’ll get you a jelly doughnut. But you should try my cruller, too. My cruller is gonna blow your mind, kid.

Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they'll wait for you forever pay attention to them and they always love you back.

It doesn’t matter how long we’ve used something; all that matters is how awesome the thing replacing it is. MP3s and automobiles happen to be really, really awesome, whereas ebooks—at least so far—are fairly limited in their awesomeness.

In the end, what makes a book valuable is not the paper it’s printed on, but the thousands of hours of work by dozens of people who are dedicated to creating the best possible reading experience for you.

Things belong to the people that use them, not to the people who create them.

That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it. It is fear like if someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store and they told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without.

Standing before this building, I learn something about fear. I learn that it is not the idle fantasies of someone who maybe wants something important to happen to him, even if the important thing is horrible. It is not the disgust of seeing a dead stranger, and not the breathlessness of hearing a shotgun pumped outside of Becca Arrington’s house. This cannot be addressed by breathing exercises. This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before. This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that made fish crawl onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead.

That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it.

He really was beautiful. I know boys aren't supposed to be. But he was.

I wanted to be one of those people who have streaks to maintain, who scorch the ground with their intensity. But for now, at least I knew such people, and they needed me, just like comets need tails.

The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle.

I dislike the phrase 'Internet friends,' because it implies that people you know online aren't really your friends, that somehow the friendship is less real or meaningful to you because it happens through Skype or text messages. The measure of a friendship is not its physicality but its significance.

There is always the risk: something is good and good and good and good, and then all at once it gets awkward. All at once, she sees you looking at her, and then she doesn't want to joke around with you anymore, because she doesn't want to seem flirty, because she doesn't want you to think she likes you. It’s such a disaster, whenever, in the course of human relationships, someone begins to chisel away at the wall of separation between friendship and kissing. Breaking down that wall is the kind of story that might have a happy middle— oh, look, we broke down this wall, I’m going to look at you like a girl and you’re going to look at me like a boy and we’re going to play a fun game called Can I Put My Hand There What About There What About There. And sometimes that happy middle looks so great that you can convince yourself that it’s not the middle but will last forever.

Because you're my friend, wingnut.

When I was little, my dad used to tell me, "Will, you can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friends nose.

I'd pick you, I say. Fuck it, I do pick you. I want you to come over to my house in twenty years with your dud and your adopted kids and I want our fucking kids to hang out and I want to, like, drink wine and talk about the Middle East or whatever the fuck we're gonna want to do when we're old. We've been friends too long to pick, but if we could pick, I'd pick you.

Anybody can look at you. It's quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.

People say friends don't destroy each otherWhat do they know about friends?

There are so many people. It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.

Sure, anyone can name fourteen dead people. But we're disorganized mourners, so a lot of people end up remembering Shakespeare, and no one ends up remembering the person he wrote Sonnet Fifty-five about.

Just like that. From a hundred miles an hour to asleep in a nanosecond. I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not f*ck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.

Do the thing you're good at. Not many people are lucky enough to be so good at something.

That’s who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of.

The longer I do my job the more I realize that humans lack good mirrors. It's so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show anyone how we feel.

I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before his recurrence that I'd never grow old with Augustus Waters. But thinking about Lidewij and her boyfriend, I felt robbed. I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up that you can't make out the waves or any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn't see it again, and it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.

The voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.

Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.

Oh shit did you just dis the feminine genderI'll pummel your ass then stick you in a blenderYou think I like Tori and Ani so I can't rhymeBut I got flow like Ghostbusters got slimeObjectify women and it's fuckin' onYou'll be dead and gone like ancient Babylon.

The only thing worse than having a party that no one attends is having a party attended only by two vastly, deeply uninteresting people.

The champagne had been donated by one of Gus's doctors - Gus being the kind of person who inspires doctors to give their best bottles of champagne to children.

Mission accomplished' I said.Pudge my friend we are indefuckingstructable.

Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.

And that infinitesimal change ripples outward -- even smaller but everlasting. I will get forgotten, but the stories will last. And so we all matter -- maybe less than a lot, but always more than none.

That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfeast cereals based on color instead of taste.

You're arguing that the fragile, rare thing is beautiful simply because it is fragile and rare. But that's a lie, and you know it.

I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence.

Because you're beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence.

What?" I asked."Nothing," he said."Why are you looking at me like that?"Augustus half smiled. "Because you're beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence.

Because you’re beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence.' A brief awkward silence ensued. Augustus plowed through: 'I mean, particularly given that, as you so deliciously pointed out, all of this will end in oblivion and everything.

Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start.

How can you read and talk at the same time?” I asked.“Well, I usually can’t, but neither the book nor the conversation is particularly intellectually challenging.

I bet if you look at the average teenager and the average adult, the average teenager has read more books in the last year than the average adult. Now of course the adult would be all like, 'I'm busy, I got a job, I got stuff to do.' WHATEVER! READ! I mean, you're watching CSI: Miami. Why would you be watching CSI: Miami, when you could be READING CSI: Miami, the novelization?

You and me will read a book and find three interesting things that we remember. But Colin finds everything intriguing. He reads a book about presidents and he remembers more of it because everything he reads clicks in his head as fugging interesting.

Reading with an eye towards metaphor allows us to become the person we’re reading about, while reading about them. That’s why there is symbols in books and why your English teacher deserves your attention. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if the author intended the symbol to be there because the job of reading is not to understand the author’s intent. The job of reading is to use stories as a way into seeing other people as a we ourselves.

Reading a good book helps us to feel un-alone.

Great books help you understand and they help you feel understood.

Why is being a nerd bad? Saying I notice you’re a nerd is like saying, ‘Hey, I notice that you’d rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you’d rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Linsey Lohan. Why is that?

History reminds us that revolutions are not events, so much that they’re processes – that for tens of thousands of years, people have been making decisions that irrevocably shaped the world that we live in today; just as today, we are making subtle, irrevocable decisions that people of the future will remember as revolutions.

The opportunity of studying history, is the opportunity to experience empathy.

The marks humans leave are too often scars.

Even then, it hurt. The pain was always there, pulling me inside of myself, demanding to be felt. It always felt like I was waking up from the pain when something in the world outside of me suddenly required my comment or attention.

That's the thing about pain. It demands to be felt...

The world," he said, "is not a wish-granting factory," and then he broke down, just for one moment, his sob roaring impotent like a clap of thunder unaccompanied by lightning, the terrible ferocity that amateurs in the field of suffering might mistake for weakness.

Well to be fair, I said, I mean she probably can't handle it. Neither can you, but she doesn't have to handle it. And you do.

Fights were recounted, battles won amid wars sure to be lost; hope was clung to; families were both celebrated and denounced; it was agreed that friends just didn't get it; tears were shed; comfort proffered.

That’s the thing about pain, it demands to be felt.

Once we got out of Jefferson Park, we rolled down the one window that worked so the world would know we had good taste in music.

You shall love your neighbourWith your crooked heart,It says so much about love and brokenness -- it's perfect.

The Degree to which I am blessed staggers me... the degree to which I take that for granted shames me.-Streetwalking with Jesus

What can we do?" Mom asked again.I shrugged.But she kept asking, as if there were something she could do, until I just kind of crawled across the couch into her lap and my dad came over and held my legs really tight and I wrapped my arms all the way around my mom's middle and they held on to me for hours while the tide rolled in.

Apparently, the world is not a wish-granting factory.

She loved so much misteries tha she became one

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand.... nor look through the eyes of the dead.... nor feed on the spectres in books. I tramp a perpetual journey All goes onward and outward.... and nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier. If no other in the world be aware I sit content, And if each and all be aware I sit content. The final three stanzas of 'Song of Myself" were also highlighted. I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles. You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to your nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood. Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one places search another, I stop some where waiting for you It became a weekend of reading, of trying to see her in the fragments of the poem she'd left for me. I could never get anywhere with the lines, but I kepr thinking about them anyway, becase I didn't want to disappoint her. She wanted me to play out with the string, to find the place where she had stopped and was waiting for me, to follow the bread crumb trail until it dead-ended into her.

I will play out the string. I will not betray your trust. I will find you.

Could the two people who are making out please be quiet?" the Colonel asked loudly from his sleeping bag. "Those of us who are not making out are drunk and tired.

War didn't scare me. I just didn't want to go all the way-hell over there to fight one. I had a reputation after that--I pretended I shot myself by accident, but everyone knew. I never did lose that reputation, but now most everyone is dead, and y'all ain't got any stories from them, so you have to believe mine by default: They were cowards, too. Everyone is.

Do you ever wonder whether people would like you more or less if they could see inside you? I mean, I've always felt like the Katherines dump me right when they start to see what I look like from the inside.

I hate that. I hate kids like that so fugging much.

The only sentence that begins with 'I' that's true of me is I'm full of shit.

..if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was ahurricane.

The end occurred mostly in her whispers and his silence - because he couldn't whisper and they didn't want to wake Colin's parents. They succeeded in staying quiet, in part because it felt like the air had been shocked out of him. Paradoxically, he felt as if his getting dumped was the only thing happening on the entire dark and silent planet, and also as if it weren't happening at all. He felt himself drifting away from the one-sided whispered conversation, wondering if maybe everything big and heartbreaking and incomprehensible is a paradox.

Everything looks uglier close up.

Lady and gentleman, when my parents left Korea with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the considerable wealth they had amassed in the shipping business, they had a dream. They had a dream that one day amid the snowy hilltops of western North Carolina, their son would lose his virginity to a cheerleader in the woman's bathroom of a Waffle House just off the interstate. My parents have sacrificed so much for this dream! And that is why we must journey on, despite all trials and tribulations! Not for me and least of all for the poor cheerleader in question, but for my parents and indeed for all immigrants who came to his great nation in what they themselves could never have: CHEERLEADER SEX.

But there was so much todo: cigarettes to smoke, sex to have, swings to swing on. I'll have more time for reading when I'm old and boring.

Her underwear, her jeans, the comforter, my corduroys and my boxers between us, I thought. Five layers, and yet I felt it, the nervous warmth of touching – a pale reflection of the fireworks of one mouth on another, but a reflection nonetheless. And in the almostness of the moment, I cared at least enough. I wasn’t sure whether I liked her, and doubted whether I could trust her, but I cared at least enough to try to find out. Her on my bed, wide green eyes staring down at me. The enduring mystery of her sly, almost smirking, smile. Five layers between us.

Without pain, how could we know joy?' This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.

this is the rough part, okay? so just stay tuned for the good part. i promise it'll come soon.

You listen to people so that you can imagine them, and you hear all the terrible and wonderful things people do to themselves and to one another,but in the end the listenin EXPOSES you even more that in exposes the people you're trying to listen to.

Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one.

I'm really not up for answering any questions that start with how, when, where, why or what.

Love"I'm in love with you," he said quietly."Augustus,"I said."I am," he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you.""Augustus," I said again, not knowing what else to say. It felt like everything was rising up in me, like I was drowning in this weirdly painful joy, but I couldn't say it back. I couldn't say anything back. I just looked at him and let him look at me until he nodded, lips pursed, and turned away, placing the side of his head against the window.

The gray paint peels off the wall in odd and beautiful patterns, each cracked polygon of paint a snowflake of decay.

A poem can't do its work if you only read snippets of it.

We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean. But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters.

It's easy to like someone from a distance. But when she stopped being this amazing attainable thing or whatever, and started being, like, just a regular girl with a weird relationship with food and frequent crankiness who's kinda bossy, then I had to basically start liking a whole different person.

I think the future deserves our faith. But it is hard to argue with Emily Dickinson.

The marks we leave are too often scars.

I just want to domething that matters. Or be something that matters. I just want to matter.

For me, at least, fiction is the only way i can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true.

But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel...it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended.

I liked reading biographies of writers, even if (as was the case with Monsieur Rabelais)I'd never read any of their actual writing. I flipped to the back and found the highlighted quote ("NEVER USE A HIGHLIGHTER IN MY BOOKS,

...there are books...which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.

The prank is entitled "Subverting the Patriarchal Paradigm".

I have a date,' he explained. 'This is an emergency.' He paused to catch his breath. 'Do you know' - breath - 'how to iron?' I walked over to the pink shirt. It was wrinkled like an old woman who'd spent her youth sunbathing. If only the Colonel didn't ball up his every belonging and stuff it into random dresser drawers. 'I think you just turn it on and press it against the shirt, right?' I said. 'I don't know. I didn't even know we had an iron.' 'We don't. It's Takumi's. But Takumi doesn't know how to iron, either. And when I asked Alaska, she started yelling, "You're not going to impose the patriarchal paradigm on me." Oh God, I need to smoke. I need to smoke, but I can't reek when I see Sara's parents. Okay, screw it. We're going to smoke in the bathroom with the shower on. The shower has steam. Steam gets rid of wrinkles, right?

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.” Easy enough to say when you’re a Roman nobleman (or Shakespeare!), but there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.

There are always answers. We just have to be smart enough.

We are taught that the hero’s journey is the journey from weakness to strength. But I am here today to tell you that those stories are wrong. The real hero’s journey is the journey from strength to weakness.

With a sigh, he grabbed hold of his chair and lifted himself out of it, then wrote on the blackboard: How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? - A.Y.'I'm going to leave that up for the rest of the semester,' he said.'Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I don't want us to forget Alaska, and I don't want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we're trying to understand how people have answered that question and the questions each of you posed in your papers--how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called 'people's rotten lots in life.

I figured something out," he said aloud. "The future is unpredictable."Hassan said, "Sometimes the kafir likes to say massively obvious things in a really profound voice.

The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible.

Jesus, I'm not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what they're going to do. I'm just going to do it.

But then the life spans started getting longer, and people started having more and more future, and so they spent more time thinking about it. About the future. And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future...

I'm not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what they're gonna do. I'm just going to do it. Imagining the future is kind of nostalgia. You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. YOu just use the future to escape the present.

Did you know that for pretty much the entire history of human species, the average life span was less than thirty years? You could count on ten years or so of real adulthood, right? There was no planning for retirement. There was no planning for a career. There was no planning. No time for planning. No time for a future. But then the life spans started getting longer, and people started having more and more future, and so they spent more time thinking about it. About the future. And now life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future - you go to high school so you can go to college so you can get a good job so you can get a nice house so you can afford to send your kids to college so they can get a good job so they can get a nice house so they can afford to send their kids to college.

.. the smell of canals and cigarette smoke, all the people sitting outside the cafés drinking beer, saying their r's and g's in a way I'd never learn. I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before this recurrance that I'd never grow old with Augustus Waters. But thinking about Lidewij and her boyfriend, I felt robbed. I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up you can't make out the waves or any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn't see it again, and it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again. That is probably true even if you live to be ninety.

You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

You can't know what an experience will mean to future-you until you are future-you. You need millions of seconds of perspective, which ultimately, only time can buy.

He was nearsighted. The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible.

There will come a time,' I said, 'when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this' - I gestured encompassingly - 'will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone else does.

In another 2,400 years, even Socrates, the most well-known genius of the century, might be forgotten. The future will erase everything--there's no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible.

Imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

I'm not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what they're going to do. I'm just going to do it. Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.

It's hard to believe in coincidence, but it's even harder to believe in anything else.

I was surprised. I'd always associated belief in heaven with, frankly, a kind of intellectual disengagement. But Gus wasn't dumb.

The vast majority of us imagine ourselves as like literature people or math people. But the truth is that the massive processor known as the human brain is neither a literature organ or a math organ. It is both and more.

(Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind.) You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.

Everyone in this tale has a rock-solid hamartia: hers, that she is so sick; yours, that you are so well. Were she better or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he had Cassius, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

Human existence is temporary and all the knowledge of the universe we acquire will in time be forgotten because there will be no humans left to benefit from any of the stuff we learned.And yet, this doesn't invalidate scientific exploration to me. We seek to understand the universe because it makes our lives better and more rich. Similarly, we tell stories (and think about why and how to tell stories) because it makes human existence richer. Made-up stories matter. They bring us pleasure and solace and nurture empathy by letting us see the world through others' eyes. They also help us to feel unalone, to understand that our grief and joy is shared not just by those around us but by all those who came before us and all those still yet to come.

Words are not static.Language shape our memories, and it is also shaped by our memories.

still, what could i say? that i didn't just feel depressed - instead, it was like the depression was the core of me, of every part of me, from my mind to my bones? that if he got blue, i got black? that i hated those pills so much, because i knew how much i relied on them to live?

weltschmerz. it's the depression you feel when the world as it is does not line up with the world as you think it should be

i am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me.those seem to be the two choices. everything else is just killing time.

i am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me. those seem to be the two choices. everything else is just killing time

i am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me. those seem to be the two choices. everything else is just killing time.

She said she couldn't handle it,’ he told me. ‘I’m about to lose my eyesight and she can’t handle it.’I was thinking about the word handle, and all the unholdable things that get handled. . . .'Well, to be fair,' I said, 'I mean, she probably can't handle it. Neither can you, but she doesn't have to handle it. And you do.''I kept saying “always” to her today, “always always always”, and she just kept talking over me and not saying it back. It was like I was already gone, you know? “Always” was a promise! How can you just break a promise?''Sometimes people don't understand the promises they're making when they make them', I said.Isaac shot me a look. ‘Right, of course. But you keep them anyway. That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promises anyway. Don’t you believe in true love?’I didn’t answer. I didn’t have an answer. But I thought that if true love did exist, that was a pretty good definition of it.

But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. - Hazel Grace Lancaster

I am constantly torn between killing myself and killing everyone around me. Those seem to be the two choices. Everything else is just killing time.

Such was life that morning: nothing really mattered that much, not the good things and not the bad ones. We were in the business of mutual amusement, and we were reasonably prosperous." (pg. 18)

I am trying to find ways to live honestly and hopefully in the world without ignoring or denying the universe´s cold and painful indifference to us.

...the kind of weather that reminds you after a long winter that while the world wasn't built for humans, we were built for the world. t

Inside the building, the sun lights up segments of the rotting wooden floor through the many holes in the roof. As I look for her, I register things: the soggy floorboards. The smell of almonds, like her. An old claw-footed bathtub in a corner. So many holes everywhere that this place is simultaneously inside and outside.

She raised one leg and gave me all her weight as I dipped her. She either trusted me or wanted to fall.

Tiny is saying, "If you can't trust your gut then what can you trust?" And I say, "You can trust that caring, as a rule, ends poorly," which is true. Caring doesn't sometimes lead to misery. It always does.

There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed OK at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can't know better until knowing better is useless.

When you say nasty things about people, you should never say the true ones, because you can't really fully and honestly take those back, you know? I mean, there are highlights. And there are streaks. And then there are skunk stripes.

. . . we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth. There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can't know better until knowing better is useless.

So I let her go, too. And I'm sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to.Takumi

... that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we have to forgive to survive in the labyrinth. There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can't know better until knowing better is useless.

He was gone, and I did not have time to tell him what I had just now realized: that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth. There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can’t know better until knowing better is useless.

You are helpful, and you are loved, and you are forgiven, and you are not alone.

...and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth.

He was gone and did not have time to tell him what I had just now realized: that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth.

The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before.

Issac:"I dislike living in a world without Augustus Waters."Computer: "I don't understand-"Issac: "Me neither. Pause

im in love with you and im not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things.

You get all these friends when just when you don't need friends anymore.

You don't get to chose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.

You can love someone so much… But you can never love someone as much as you miss them.

There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can’t know better until knowing better is useless.

I am crying, he thought, opening his eyes to stare through the soapy, stinging water. I feel like crying, so I must be crying, but it's impossible to tell because I'm underwater. But he wasn't crying. Curiously, he felt too depressed to cry. Too hurt. It felt as if she'd taken the part of him that cried.

Grief does not change you. It reveals you.

I needed, I decided, to really know her, because I needed more to remember. Before I could begin the shameful process of forgetting the how and the why of her living and dying, I needed to learn it: How. Why. When. Where. What.

(...) and then I realized there was no one else to call, which was the saddest thing. The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Water's death was Augustus Water.

Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will," she says.The sky is like a monochromatic contemporary painting, drawing me in with its illusion of depth, pulling me up. "Yeah, that's true," I say. But then after I think about it for a second, I add, "But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all.

I think how much depends upon a best friend. When you wake up in the morning you swing your legs out of bed and you put your feet on the ground and you stand up. You don't scoot to the edge of the bed and look down to make sure the floor is there. The floor is always there. Until it's not.

What you must understand about me is that I’m a deeply unhappy person.

No reason to be angry. Anger just distracts from the all-encompassing sadness.

The silence broke:"Sometimes I liked it", I said "Sometimes I liked it that she was dead.""You mean it felt good?""No. I don't know. It felt ... pure.

Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning she haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again.

Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will. But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all

People always talk like there's a bright line between imagination and memory, but there isn't, at least not for me. I remember what I've imagined and imagine what I remember.

I lay down and started to feel a little depressed about prom. I refused to feel any kind of sadness over the fact that I wasn't going to prom, but I had - stupidly, embarrassingly - thought of finding Margo, and getting her to come home with me just in time for prom, like late on Saturday night, and we'd walk into the Hilton ballroom wearing jeans and ratty T-shirts, and we'd be just in time for the last dance, and we'd dance while everyone pointed at us and marveled at the return of Margo, and then we'd fox-trot the hell out of there and go get ice cream at Friendly's. So yes, like Ben, I harbored ridiculous prom fantasies. But at least I didn't say mine out loud.

But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all. Imagining isn't perfect. You can't get all the way inside someone else. I could never have imagined Margo's anger at being found, or the story she was writing over. But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in.

...being in a bad mood with your friends beats being in a bad mood without them.

This was what I liked most about my friends: just sitting around and telling stories. Window stories and mirror stories. I only listened - the stories on my mind weren't that funny.

Part of not being a self-centered asshole, Colin reasoned, is doing things with your friends even when you don't want to.

You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friends nose.

you can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friends nose.

Kafir, you have a very complicated problem with a very simple solution.

Most of my friends were in band, and most of my free time during school was spent within twenty feet of the band room

Books—they weren't ladders out of the abyss, but they were companions.

He really was beautiful. I know boys aren’t supposed to be, but he was.

I realize that they giggle and I actually laugh, that they show their cleavage and I have none to show, but just so you know, I am also a girl. I'm one of the three wise MEN. And it's gay to think that James Bond is hot.

You'll... you'll... live your best life today.

Sometimes I dream that I'm writing a memoir. A memoir would just be the thing to keep me in the hearts and memories of my adoring public.

Why do writers use symbolism?” Okay, so let’s say you have a headache and you wanna tell someone about it and you say, “I have a headache!” and other people are like, “Yeah, whatever. Everybody gets headaches.” But your headache is not a regular headache, it’s a serious headache, so you say, “My brain is on fire!” to try to help these people understand that this is a headache that needs attention! That’s a metaphor, right? And you use it so that you can be understood. Now let’s say you want to take those same imagistic principles but apply them to a much more complex idea than having a headache, like, for instance, the yearning that one feels for one’s dreams. And you can see the dream but you can’t cross the bay to get to the green light that embodies your dream. And you want to talk about how socio-economic class in America is a barrier – a bay-like barrier, some would say – that stands between you and the green light and makes that gap unbridgeable. Now, you can just talk about that stuff directly, but when you talk about it symbolically, it becomes more powerful, because instead of being abstract it becomes kind of observable…. So I think that’s why.

That brief walk was one of those moments he knew he'd remember and look back on, one of those moments that he'd try to capture in the stories he told. Nothing was happening, really, but the moment was thick with mattering.[p214]

I wondered if there would ever be a day when I didn't think about Alaska, wondered whether I should hope for a time when she would be a distant memory - recalled only on the anniversary of her death, or maybe a couple of weeks after, remembering only after having forgotten.

I knew that I would know more dead people. The bodies pile up. Could there be a space in my memory for each of them, or would I forget a little of Alaska every day for the rest of my life?

Maybe Harry Potter is real and you're not.

Nothing ever happens like you imagine it will… but then again, if you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens at all. Imagining isn’t perfect. You can’t get all the way inside someone else… But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills the fascists

Don't worry. Worry is useless. I worried anyway

but there was nothing I could do to dim the supernovae exploding inside my brain, an endless chain of intra cranial firecrackers

Once you think a thought, it is extremely difficult to unthink it. And I had thought the thought.

My thoughts are stars I can't fanthom into constellations.

My thoughts are stars i cannot fathom into constellations

We left. We did not say: Don't drive, You're drunk. We did not say: We aren't letting you in that car when you are upset. We did not say: We insist on going with you. We did not say: This can wait until tomorrow. Anything-everything-can wait.

I thought: That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it. It is fear like if someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store they told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without.

I thought: We are not close enough. I though: He will not hear it. I thought: He will hear it and be out so fast that we will have no chance. I thought: Twenty seconds. I was breathing hard and fast.

I thought: This is not good. I though: I am not bad at kissing. Not at bad at all. I thought: I am clearly the greatest kisser in the history of the universe.

I thought: We are not close enough. I thought: He will not hear it. I thought: He will hear it and be out so fast that we will have no chance. I thought: Twenty seconds. I was breathing hard ans fast.

The only person I really wanted to talk about Augustus Waters was Augustus Waters.

The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Waters' death was Augustus Waters.

All I know of heaven and all I know of death is in this park: an elegant universe in ceaseless motion, teeming with ruined ruins and screaming children.

Night falls fast. Today is in the past.

...But there's always suffering, Pudge. Homework or malaria or having a boyfriend who lives far away when there's a good-looking boy lying next to you. Suffering is universal. It's the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about.

Nothing's wrong. But there's always suffering, Pudge. Homework or malaria or having a boyfriend who lives far away when there's a good-looking boy lying next to you. Suffering is universal.

How will we ever get out of the labyrinth of suffering ?

How wil we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering?

... because Mr. Applebaum, who is ostensibly teaching us precalculus but is mostly teaching me that pain and suffering must be endured stoically, says, "You feel what, Tiny?".

It's not life or death, the labyrinth. Suffering. Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you.

Suffering is universal. It's the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about.

Suffering is universal. It's the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.

... I didn't know whether to feel angry at her for making me part of her suicide or just to feel angry at myself for letting her go.

You are a side effect," Van Houten continued, "of an evolutionary process that cares little for individual lives. You are a failed experiment in mutation.

Colin "I'm just--I'm just a failure. what if this is it? -----andI never do anything significant and I'm just a complete waste?"Hassan sat up, with his hands on his knees. "See, this is why you need to believe in God.

So we gave up. I'd finally had enough of chasing after a ghost who did not want to be seen. We'd failed, maybe, but some mysteries aren't meant to be solved.

I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn't see it again, and it occured to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.

Like, in general I think people have very complicated reasons for wanting things, and we often have no idea whether we’re actually motivated by altruism or a desire to hook up or a search for answers or what. I always get annoyed when in books or movies characters want clear things for clear reasons, because my experience of humanness is that I always want messy things for messy reasons.

We bring the fucking rain Q, not the scattered showers.

Paper Towns for a Paper Girl, who wants to think and read clearly

She loves mysteries so much, she became one.

She loves mysteries that she became one.

I don't understand why you're so obsessed with figuring out everything that happens here, like we have to unravel every mystery.

The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightening, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us. I could have seen it rain frogs. I could have stepped foot on Mars. I could have been eaten by a whale. I could have married the Queen of England or survived months at sea. But my miracle was different. My miracle was this: out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman.

At some point, you just pull off the band aid and it hurts. But when it is over, you are relieved.

I feel like I might start crying and that I'm going to cry pee.

I just held her hand and tried to imagine the world without us and for about one second I was a good enough person to hope she died so she would never know that I was going, too. But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love.

Thanks for not trying to see me when I looked like hell.”“To be fair, you still look pretty bad.

You realise that trying to keep your distance from me will not lessen my affection for you,” he said.

But alas, the world is not a wish-granting factory.

On the morning in question, she wore white shorts and a pink T-shirt that featured a green dragon breathing a fire of orange glitter. It is difficult to explain how awesome I found this T-shirt at the time.

I am concussed,' I announced, entirely sure of my self-diagnosis.''You're fine,' Takumi said as he jogged back towards me. ''Let's get out of here before we're killed.''''I'm sorry,' I said. ''But I can't get up. I have suffered a mild concussion.''Lara ran out and sat down next to me.''Are you OK?''''I am concussed,'' I said.Takumi sat down with me and looked me in the eye. ''Do you know what happened to you?''''The beast got me.''''Do you know where you are?''''I'm on a triple-and-a-half date.''''You're fine,'' Takumi said. ''Let's go.''And then I leaned forward and threw up on Lara's pants.

There's no romance in geometry," Lindsey answered. "Just you wait.

She laughed. ''You seem pretty normal.''''You've never seen Ben snort Sprite up his nose and then spit it out of his mouth,'' I said.''I look like a demented carbonated fountain,'' he deadpanned.

There is no Them. There are only facets of Us.

I wanted us to have an adventure. Because I love that crap. Because I'm not whatever-her-name-is. I don't think it's oh so hard to walk four miles in the snow. I want that. I love that.

The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn't actually invent anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn't get smallpox.

Who am I to say that these things might nit be forever? Who is Peter Van Houten to assert as fact the conjecture that our labor is temporary?

There is no shortage of fault to be found amidst our stars.

There is not shortage of fault to be found amidst our stars.

sametimes people don't understand the promises they're making when they make them

I was struck by an awful thought, the kind that cannot be taken back once it escapes into the open air of consciousness; it seemed to me that this was not a place you go to live. It was a place you go to die.

My dad finished chewing something and then put his fork down and looked at me. 'The longer I do my job,' he said. 'the more I realize that humans lack good mirrors. It's so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show anyone how we feel.''That is really lovely,' my mom said. I liked that they liked each other. 'But isn't it also that on some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are? We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.''True. Consciousness makes for poor windows, too. I don't think I'd ever thought about it quite that way.

I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward the consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed.

and I told myself -- as I've told myself before -- that the body shuts down then the pain gets too bad, that consciousness is temporary, that this will pass. But just like always, I didn't slip away. I was left on the shore with the waves washing over me, unable to drown.

depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me will full hands; How could I answer the child?......I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. There was the hope Dr. Holden had talked about-the grass was a metaphor for his hope. But that"s not all. He continues, Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped, Like grass is a metaphor for God's greatness or something.... And then soon after is itself a child.... And then soon after that, Or, I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, And it means, Sprouting alike in broadzones and narrow zones. Growing among black folk as among white.

We have a bad habit of seeing books as sort of cheaply made movies where the words do nothing but create visual narratives in our heads.So too often what passes for literary criticism is "I couldn't picture that guy", or "I liked that part", or "this part shouldn't have happened." That is, we've left language so far behind that sometimes we judge quality solely based on a story's actions.So we can appreciate a novel that constructs its conflicts primarily through plot - the layered ambiguity of a fatal car accident caused by a vehicle owned by Gatsby but driven by someone else, for instance. But in this image-drenched world, sometimes we struggle to appreciate and celebrate books where the quality arises not exclusively from plot but also from the language itself.

I leave, and the leaving is so exhilarating I know I can never go back. But then what? Do I just keep leaving places, and leaving them, and leaving them, tramping a perpetual journey?

Where is my chance to be somebody's Peter Van Houten?' He hit the steering wheel weakly, the car honking as he cried. He leaned his head back, looking up. 'I hate myself I hate myself I hate this I hate this I disgust myself I hate it I hate it I hate it just let me fucking die.

We got off at the next exit, quietly, and, switching drivers, we walked in front of the car. We met and I held him, my hands balled into tight fists around his shoulders, and he wrapped his short arms around me and squeezed tight, so that I felt the heaves of his chest as we realized over and over again that we were still alive. I realized it in waves and we held on to each other crying and I thought, 'God we must look so lame,' but it doesn't matter when you have just now realized, all the time later, that you are still alive.

I lit up like a Christmas tree-Augustus Waters

If people were rain i was drizzle and she was a hurrican.

We don't get to choose if we get hurt in this world, old man, but we do have a say in who hurts us. I know I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.I do, Augustus. I do.

I called Isaac, who cursed life and the universe and God Himself and who said where are the goddamned trophies to break when you need them, and then I realized there was no one else to call, which was the saddest thing. The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus Waters’s death was Augustus Waters.

It lit up like a Christmas Tree Hazel Grace...

That deep, can-still-taste-her-in-my-mouth sleep.

humans lack good mirrors. It's so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show anyone how we feel

Caroline was always moody and miserable, but I liked it. I liked feeling as if she had chosen me as the only person in the world not to hate, and so we spent all this time together just ragging on everyone, you know?

I hated sports. I hated sports, and I hated people who played them, and I hated people who watched them, and Ihated people who didn't hate people who watched or played them.

The town was paper, but the memories were not.

And the moral of the story is that you don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.

The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rockstar and you think, "They'll remember me now," but (a) they don't remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion.

On some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are.

Everyone wants to leave an extraordinary life.

You could hear the wind in the leaves, and on that wind traveled the screams of the kids on the playground in the distance, little kids figuring out how to be alive, how to navigate a world that wasn't made for them by navigating a playground that was.

He reached up t0 grab one and came down with several, and they kept coming, washing over him, floating all around him. Never have tampon strings seemed so beautiful as they rolled up and down with the wind, landing on the ground and then twirling and floating up again, falling and rising and falling and rising.

Why are you looking at me like that?"Augustus half smiled. "Because you`re beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence.

Thomas Edison’s last words were ‘It’s very beautiful over there’. I don’t know where there is, but I believe it’s somewhere, and I hope it’s beautiful

Here's the thing about Hazel: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That's what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease.I want to leave a mark.But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars. You build a hideous minimall or start a coup or try to become a rock star and you think, "They'll remember me now," but (a) they don't remember you, and (b) all you leave behind are more scars. Your coup becomes a dictatorship. Your minimall becomes a lesion....We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can't stop pissing on fire hydrants. I know it's silly and useless--epically useless in my current state--but I am an animal like any other.Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. Hazel knows the truth: We're as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we're not likely to do either.People will say it's sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it's not sad, Van Houten. It's triumphant. It's heroic. Isn't that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm.The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn't actually invent anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn't get smallpox....But then I wanted more time so we could fall in love. I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar....What else? She is so beautiful. You don't get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.

…it argues that true love will triumph in the end (which may or may not be true) but if it’s a lie, it’s the most beautiful lie we have!

But of course, the universe does not conspire to put you in one place rather than another.

what we want is to be noticed by the universe, to have the universe give a shit what happens to us- not the collective idea of sentient life but each of us as individuals.

Who am I to say that these things might not be forever? Who is Peter Van Houten to assert as fact the conjecture that our labor is temporary? All I know of heaven and all I know of death is in this park; an elegant universe in ceaseless motion, teeming with ruined ruins and screaming children.

You don’t get to have an opinion on whether .999… is equal to 1, for instance. It is equal to 1. People smarter than us have worked hard to figure this stuff out, and we owe it to them and to the universe to respect what they’ve figured out.

Jesus, why would he hook up with Becca?" "Well, she's not known for her personality or generosity of spirit, so it's probably because she's hot." "She's not as hot as you," I said, before I could think better of it. "That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people would want to around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste.

You get caught in being something, being cool or special or whatever, to the point where you don’t even know why you need it; you just think you do

You don't get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to lover her.

if you don't believe,nothing ever happens at all.

Oh, I wouldn't mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.

Hey, it’s Col. I’m standing in a soybean field outside of Gutshot, Tennessee, which is a long story, and it’s hot. K. I’m standing here sweating like I had hyperhidrosis, that disease where you sweat a lot. Crap. That’s not interesting. But anyway, it’s hot, and so I’m thinking about cold to stay cool. And I was remembering walking through the snow coming back from the ridiculous movie. Do you remember that, K? We were on Giddings, and the snow made it so quiet, I couldn’t hear a thing in the world but you. And it was so cold then, and so silent, and I loved you so much. Now it’s hot, and dead quiet again, and I love you still.

We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. I can't stop pissing on fire hydrants...I am an animal like any other. Hazel is different. she walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth. She knows the truth: We're as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we're not likely to do either.People will say it's sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it's not sad. It's triumphant. It's heroic. Isn't that the real heroism?The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention.

The whole thing was the precise opposite of what I figured it would be: slow and patient and quiet and neither particularly painful nor particularly ecstatic

What else? She is so beautiful. You don't get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.I do, Augustus.I do.

there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars

While the world wasn't build for the humans, we were built for the world

That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people would want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfast cereals based on color instead of taste. But I'm not pretty, not close up anyway. Generally, the closer people get to me the less hot they find me.

Your party kicked so much ass!Even though you suck so much! It's like, instead of blood, your heart pumps liquid suck! But thanks for the beer!

I walked to his bedside table next. Infinite Mayhem. the ninth sequel to The Prince of Dawn, lay atop the table next to his reading lamp, the corner of page 138 turned down. He'd never made it to the end of the book. 'Spoiler alert: Mayhem survives,' I said out loud to him, just in case he could hear me.

All hurt is brain hurt.

The missing piece in his stomach hurt so much-and eventually he stopped thinking about the Theorem and wondered only how something that isn't there can hurt you.

Nuts, arms, stomachs -- they never hurt. All hurt is brain hurt.

It hurt, and that is not a euphemism. It hurt like a beating.

This is all so CHILDISH PATHETIC. YOU'RE EMBARASSING. GET OVER IT GET OVER IT GET OVER IT. But he did not quite know what "it" was.

You're both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You're the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You're the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody's something, but you are also your you.

...stories don’t just make us matter to each other—maybe they’re also theonly way to the infinite mattering he’d been after for so long.

The humans lack good mirrors. It's so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show them how we feel.

The existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate.

The existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate".

I just want you to be happy. If that’s with me or with someone else or with nobody. I just want you to be happy.

People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the though of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believe in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to.

Let me just acknowlege that the function of grammar is to make language as efficent and clear and transparent as possible. But if we’re all constantly correcting each other’s grammar and being really snotty about it, then people stop talking because they start to be petrified that they’re going to make some sort of terrible grammatical error and that’s precisely the opposite of what grammar is supposed to do, which is to facilitate clear communication.

Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don't want to make eye contact while doin

[T]here is something to recommend a story that ends.

I'm so proud of you that it makes me proud of me. I hope you know that.

We are all going, I thought, and it applies to turtles and turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.

As a child I was an inveterate liar. As opposed to now, I am a Novelist.

All writing is rewriting.

As he read, I feel in love the way you fall asleep: slow, and then all at once.

I did some research on this a couple years ago," Augustus continued. "I was wondering if everybody could be remembered. Like, if we got organized, and assigned a certain number of corpses to each living person, would there be enough living people to remember all the dead people?""And are there?" "Sure, anyone can name fourteen dead people. But we're disorganized mourners, so a lot of people end up remembering Shakespeare and no one ends up remembering the person he wrote Sonnet Fifty-five about

In the ensuing silence, I have the time to contemplate the word cute – how dismissive it is, how it’s the equivalent of calling someone little, how it makes a person into a baby, how the word is a neon sign burning through the dark reading, “Feel Bad About Yourself.

If you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all

Her primary reason for living and my primary reason for living were awfully entangled.

It's hard as hell to hold onto your dignity when the risen sun is too bright in your losing eyes, and that's what I was thinking about as we hunted for bad guys through the ruins of a city that didn't exist.

You could hold me and I could hold you. And it would be so peaceful. Completely peaceful. Like the feeling of sleep, but awake in it together.

I felt bashful, like I had when I'd first told him of An Imperial Affliction. "Um, okay. Okay. 'Let us go, trough certain half-deserted streets,/ The muttering retreats/ Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels/ and sawdust restaurants with oyster shells:/ Streets that follow like a tedious argument/ Of insidious intent/ To lead you to an overwhelming question../Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"/ Let us go and make our visit" "I'm in love with you," he said quietly. "Augustus," I said. "I am, " he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you." "Augustus," I said again, not knowing what else to say. It felt like everything was rising up in me, like I was drowning in this wierdly painful joy, but I couldn't say it back. I couldn't say it back. I just looked at him and let him look at me until he nodded, lips pursed, and turned away, placing the side of his head against the window.

You should see it,” he said. “V for Vendetta, I mean.”“Okay,” I said. “I’ll look it up.”“No. With me. At my house,” he said. “Now.

And on some level it walways felt like kids paying at being grown

That's what I believe. I believe that universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it-or my observation of it-is temporary?

A sequel that will exist just for us

We have to forgive to survive in this labyrinth [of suffering]

We need never to be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken.

She'd obviously read the book many times before, and so she read flawlessly and confidently, and I could hear her smile in the reading of it, and the sound of that smile made me think that maybe I would like novels better if Alaska Young read them to me.

...you missed the chance to explore the equally interesting Buddhist belief in being present for every facet of your daily life, of being truly present. Be present in this class. And then, when it's over be present out there,

We live in a universe devoted to the creation, and eradication, of awareness. Augustus Waters did not die after a lengthy battle with cancer. He died after a lengthy battle with human consciousness, a victim - as you will be - of the universe's need to make and unmake all that is possible.

We live in a universe devoted to the creation, and eradication, of awareness.

Some tourist think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a ciry of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.

It occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because the is always the thought that everything might be done better and again

Were she better, or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he had Cassius note, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/But in ourselves.

The oblivion fear is something else, fear that I won't be able to give anything in exchange for my life. If you don't live a life in service of a greater good, you've gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won't get either a life or a death that means anything.

Life tries to crush her, but only succeeded in making a diamond.

I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and toward the end, his wife started crying and screaming, "I want to go, too! I want to go, too!" And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: "We are all going.

Because so many people use goodreads, it is an amazingly good—and amazingly underutilized—resource for understanding what people read, why, and how they feel about their reading experiences.

Your professional physicist opinion?" I ask.She smiles. "I believe the cat to be alive. And what says my esteemed colleague?""Alive," I say.

and then I couldn't wait anymore, and my hand was on the back of her head, and then her lips on mine, the cold air gone and replaced with the warmth of her mouth, soft and sweet and hash-brown-tastic

Okay, so anagrams. That’s one. Got any other charming talents?” she asked, and now he felt confident.Finally, Colin turned to her, gathering in his gut the slim measure of courage available to him, and said, “Well, I’m a fair kisser.

Ergo: girls should always make the first move, because (a) they are, on the whole, less likely to be rejected than guys, (b) that way, girls will never get kissed unless they want to be kissed.

You used," he said, and then took a sharp breath, "to call me Augustus.

True love will triumph in the end—which may or may not be a lie, but if it is a lie, it's the most beautiful lie we have.

I've never known before what it feels like to want someone - not to want to hook up with them or whatever, but to want them, to want them. And now I do. So maybe I do believe in epiphanies.

...everybody should have true love, and it should last at least as long as your life does.

Always' was a promise! How can you just break the promise?" "Sometimes people don't always understand the promises they're making when they make them," I said.Isaac shot me a look. "Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That's what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don't you believe in true love?"I didn't answer. I didn't have an answer.But I thought that if true love did exist, that was a pretty good definition of it.

All salvation is temporary, . . . I bought them a minute. Maybe that's the minute that buys them an hour, which is the hour that buys them a year. No one's gonna buy them forever, Hazel Grace, but my life bought them a minute. And that's not nothing.

We are not as frail as the strings would make us believe.

Whenever I'm asked what advice I have for young writers, I always say that the first thing is to read, and to read a lot. The second thing is to write. And the third thing, which I think is absolutely vital, is to tell stories and listen closely to the stories you're being told.

Jeb is going to grow up to be the kind of man who spends his Saturdays teaching his little boy to ride a bike. (...) Charlie, on the other hand, will be off playing golf while his kid kills people on his Xbox. Charlie will be dashing and debonair, and he'll buy his kid all kinds of crap, but he'll never actually be there.

I'm a grenade, I just want to stay away from people and read books, and think...

Ultimately what I like about reading together is that we all make it happen together. Of course even amid shared experience we’re still alone… each reading of each book is unique. But what a comfort it is to share readings and experiences. How lucky we are when we get to be alone together.

She has enough black eyeliner on to outline a corpse, and her skin's so pale she looks like she's just broken dawn.

Such is life. We grow up. Planets like Tiny get new moons. Moons like me get new planets.

I kept thinking there were two kinds of adults: There were...miserable creatures who scoured the earth in search of something to hurt. And then there were people like my parents, who walked around zombically, doing whatever they had to do to keep walking around.

I know it’s impossible for you to see peers this way, but when you’re older, you start to see them—the bad kids and the good kids and all kids—as people. They’re just people, who deserve to be cared for. Varying degrees of sick, varying degrees of neurotic, varying degrees of self- actualized.

I was so good at being a kid, and so terrible at being whatever I was now.

We all want to do something to mitigate the pain of loss or to turn grief into something positive, to find a silver lining in the clouds. But I believe there is real value in just standing there, being still, being sad.

When you're on a Ferris wheel all anyone ever talks about is being on the Ferris wheel and the view from the Ferris wheel and whether the Ferris wheel is scary and how many more times it will go around. Dating is like that. Nobody who's doing it ever talks about anything else. I have no interest in dating.

It's funny how they thought we were dating," Colin said, glancing over at her."How's that funny?" she asked, holding his gaze."Um," he said. Distracted from the road, Colin watched as she gave him the slightest version of her inimitable smile.

It became a weekend of reading, of trying to see her in the fragments of the poem she'd left for me.

I do my precalc homework, and then when I'm done I actually sit with the textbook for like three hours and try to understand what I just did. That's the kind of weekend it is--the kind where you have so much time you go past the answers and start looking into the ideas.

What are you assholes looking at?" "Nothing," said Radar. "We're certainly not looking at your eyebrows.

...the kind of weather that reminds you after a long winter that while the world wasn't built for humans, we were built for the world.

The longer I do my job ... the more I realize that humans lack good mirrors. It's so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show anyone how we feel.

Pudge/Colonel: "I am sorry that I have not talked to you before. I am not staying for graduation. I leave for Japan tomorrow morning. For a long time, I was mad at you. The way you cut me out of everything hurt me, and so I kept what I knew to myself. But then even after I wasn't mad anymore, I still didn't say anything, and I don't even really know why. Pudge had that kiss, I guess. And I had this secret. You've mostly figured this out, but the truth is that I saw her that night, I'd stayed up late with Lara and some people, and then I was falling asleep and I heard her crying outside my back window. It was like 3:15 that morning, maybe, amd I walked out there and saw her walking through the soccer field. I tried to talk to her, but she was in a hurry. She told me that her mother was dead eight years that day, and that she always put flowers on her mother's grave on the anniversary but she forgot that year. She was out there looking for flowers, but it was too early-too wintry. That's how I knew about January 10. I still have no idea whether it was suicide. She was so sad, and I didn't know what to say or do. I think she counted on me to be the one person who would always say and do the right things to help her, but I couldn"t. I just thought she was looking for flowers. I didn't know she was going to go. She was drunk just trashed drunk, and I really didn't think she would drive or anything. I thought she would just cry herself to sleep and then drive to visit her mom the next day or something. She walked away, and then I heard a car start. I don't know what I was thinking. So I let her go too. And I'm sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to." Takumi

I couldn’t help but think about school and everything else ending. I liked standing just outside the couches and watching them—it was a kind of sad I didn’t mind, and so I just listened, letting all the happiness and the sadness of this ending swirl around in me, each sharpening the other. For the longest time, it felt kind of like my chest was cracking open, but not precisely in an unpleasant way.

I hated listening to everyone else stumble on their words and try to phrase things in the vaguest possible way so they wouldn't sound dumb, and I hated how it was all just a game of trying to figure out what the teacher wanted to hear and then saying it.

Be present in this class. And then, when it's over, be present out there.

I realized that all my life, my values were based upon typical middle-class American values: hard work, doing good, living well, owning things, following the rules & being the best I can be... but God clearly says, "those are not MY values. I value justice, mercy & humility.

All of us, poor & rich alike, have been conditioned by our upbringings. Impoverished men & women may become lulled into a state of "learned helplessness" without hope to change their lives. Likewise, the wealthy can walk in a state of "learned blindness" ignoring the desperation of the local & global poor.

One of the Great Rules of Economics According to John GreenIf you are rich, you have to be an idiot not to stay rich. And if you are poor, you have to be really smart to get rich.

Later, I walked towards the dorm circle beside Alaska. The cicadas hummed their one-note song, just as they had at home in Florida. She turned to me as we made our way through the darkness and said,"When you’re walking at night, do you ever get creeped out and even though it’s silly and embarrassing you just want to run home?”It seemed too secret and personal to admit to a virtual stranger but I told her, “Yeah, totally.”For a moment, she was quiet. Then she grabbed my hand, whispered,“Run run run run run,” and took off, pulling me behind her.

... going out late at night and laying in the dewy field and reading a Kurt Vonnegut book by moonlight.

When you date someone, you have the markers along the way, right: You kiss, you have The Talk, you say the Three Little Words, you sit on a swing set and break up. You can plot the points on a graph. And you check up with each other along the way: Can I do this? If I say this, will you say it back?"But with friendship, there's nothing like that. Being in a relationship, that's something you choose. Being friends, that's just something you are.

He just waited until I stopped talking and said, 'Jesus, kid, you're almost a detective. All you need now is a gun, a gut, and three ex-wives. So what's your theory?

Where do you come up with these zingers, Clint? Do you own some kind of joke factory in Indonesia where you've got eight-year-olds working ninety hours a week to deliver you that kind of top-quality witticism? There are boy bands with more original material.

We are literally in the heart of Jesus," he said."I thought we were in a church basement, but we are literally in the heart of Jesus.""Someone should tell Jesus," I said. "I mean, it's gotta be dangerous, storing children with cancer in your heart.

All right. The snow may be falling in the winter of my discontent, but at least I've got sarcastic company.

Everyone wanted me to feed them that story—darkness to light, weakness to strength, broken to whole. I wanted it, too.

It’s so weird, to know you’re crazy and not be able to do anything about it, you know? It’s not like you believe yourself to be normal. You know there is a problem. But you can’t figure a way through to fixing it. Because you can’t be sure, you know?

Physical intimacy isn’t and can never be an effective substitute for emotional intimacy.

How you matter is defined by the things that matter to you. You matter as much as the things that matter to you do.

There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow - that, in short, we are all going.

Both my parents are therapists, which means that I am really goddamned well adjusted.

So you've been gone a couple days,' Alison said. 'Hmm, what'd you miss...A celebrity did drugs. Politicians disagreed. A different celebrity wore a bikini that revealed a bodily imperfection. A team won a sporting event, but another team lost.' I smiled. 'You can't go disappearing on everybody like this, Hazel. You miss too much.

Patients are almost always preceded by their parents, because no matter how fast an ambulance can drive, terrified parents can drive faster.

His problems are so huge that your problems can just hide behind them.

What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding in an hour.

[I]t occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.

I take quite a lot of pride in not knowing what´s cool".

I take quite a lot of pride in not knowing what´s cool.

The next morning I had Twentieth-Century American Poetry at MCC. This old woman gave a lecture wherein she managed to talk for ninety minutes about Sylvia Plath without ever once quoting a single word of Sylvia Plath.

I wondered if hurdlers ever thought, you know, "This would go faster if we just got rid of the hurdles.

Teenagers think they are invincible” with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don’t know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.

Lonely, Vaguely Pedophilic Swing Set Seeks the Butts of Children.

That’s part of what I like about the book in some ways. It portrays death truthfully. You die in the middle of your life, in the middle of a sentence

There is only one things in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you're sixteen, and that's having a kid who bites it from cancer.

To die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.

(I didn’t tell him that thediagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You’re a woman. Now die.)

Chip, she’s gone,” and he said, “I thought I’d feel her looking down on us, but you’re right. She’s just gone

I know what happens a the end of falling-landing

That's the thing about pain, it demands to be felt.

The problem, of course, is that there's no way of knowing that your last good day is your Last Good Day. At the time, it's just another good day.

Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.

If people were rain I was a drizzle and she was a hurricane.

But I believe in true love, you know? Idon’t believe that everybody gets to keep their eyes or not get sick or whatever, but everybody should have true love, and it should last at least as long as your life does.

We were just standing there, and her eyes were so interesting. Not in the usual way of being interesting, like being extremely blue or extremely big or flanked by obscenely long lashes or anything.

I worked hard to meet his eyes, even though they were the kind of pretty that’s hard to look at..

You can’t burn down a made-up place.

And then something invisible snapped insider her, and that which had come together commenced to fall apart.

How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!" to a margin note written in her loop-heavy cursive: Straight & Fast.

She has great breasts," the Colonel said without looking up from the whale."DO NOT OBJECTIFY WOMEN'S BODIES!" Alaska shouted.Now he looked up. "Sorry. Perky breasts.""That's not any better!

And we'll call you...hmmm. Pudge.""Huh?""Pudge," the Colonel said. "Because you're skinny. It's called irony, Pudge. Heard of it? Now, let's go get some cigarettes and start this year off right.

You are so busy being YOU that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.

We just did an awesome job of not dying.

I don't think you're dying," I said. "I think you've just got a touch of cancer.He smiled. Gallows humor.

How fun it would be to bounce on the back of Lidewij Vliegenthart’s bike down the brick streets, her curly red hair blowing into my face, the smell of the canals and cigarette smoke, all the people sitting outside the cafés drinking beer, saying their r’s and g’s in a way I’d never learn. I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before his recurrence that I’d never grow old with Augustus Waters. But thinking about Lidewij and her boyfriend, I felt robbed. I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up that you can’t make out the waves or any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn’t see it again, and it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again.

Worry is yet another side effect of dying.

This is your war now.' I despised myself for the cheesy sentiment, but what else did I have?'Some war,' he said dismissively. 'What am I at war with? My cancer. And what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They're made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me. It is a civil war, Hazel Graze, with a predetermined winner.

Peter Van Houten was the only person I’d ever come across who seemed to (a) understand what it’slike to be dying, and (b) not have died.

I would not be dying if it were not for her. I would have stayed home, as I have always stayed home, and I would have been safe, and I would have done the one thing I have always wanted to do, which is to grow up.

And, since they are theater people, they are all talking. All of them. Simultaneously. They do not need to be heard; they only need to be speaking.

Honestly, I don't even like my type of girl that much, let alone other types. Not that I'm asexual or something - I just find Romance Drama unbearable.

I mean, he was something that happened to me, you know? But before he was this minor figure in the drama of my life he was - you know, the central figure in the drama of his own life.

I just want to be enough for you, but I never can be. This can never be enough for you. But this is all you get. You get me, and your family, and this world. This is your life. I'm sorry if it sucks. But you're not going to be the first man on Mars and you're not going to be an NBA star, and you're not going to hunt Nazis.

We care about the dead. We try with our lives to honor theirs. That’s how we make our lives meaningful, and how we make their lives meaningful, too.

I think if you went back to the eighteenth century and you asked a fifteen year old boy, 'Would you like to marry a woman who has had plastic bags needlessly inserted into her breasts?', that fifteen year old boy would probably be like, 'what's plastic?'.

She’s adorable .” “How would you know?” “I’m gay, not blind. Her hair’s all poofy and she’s got a great nose. I mean, a great nose. And, what? What do you people like? Boobs? She seems to have boobs. They seem to be of approximately normal boob size. What else do you want?

The afternoon light brightening the green in her eyes, her tan skin the last memory of fall

We told Mom about the Anne Frank House, leaving out the kissing."Did you go back to chez Van Houten afterward?" Mom asked.Augustus didn't even give me time to blush."Nah, we just hung out at a café. Hazel amused me with some Venn diagram humor."He glanced at me. God, he was sexy.

I didn't know what to say to her - I was caught in a love triangle with one dead side.

More than anything, I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someonewho might have loved you back but can't due to deadness, and then I leaned forward, my forehead against the back of Takumi's headrest, and Icried, whimpering, and I didn't even feel sadness so much as pain.

Some infinities are bigger than other infinities"- The Fault in our Stars

We are living the American Dream, which is, of course, to benefit from someone else’s misfortune.

She noted, more than once, that the meteor shower was happening, beyond the overcast sky, even if we could not see it. Who cares if she can kiss? She can see through the clouds.

I wasn't disappointed. My expectations had been met.

Because you’re beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence.

I would never slay the dragon, because the dragon was also me.

The abbreviated exam week meant that Wednesday was the last day of school for us. And all day long, it was hard not to walk around, thinking about the lastness of it all.

I didn't really want to come back here and again have to feel like my lungs were drowning in this perverse nostalgia.

Why had Ovid lived in Ancient Rome in 20 BCE23 and not Chicago in 2006 CE? Would Ovid still have been Ovid if he had lived in America? No, he wouldn’t have been, because he would have been a Native American or possibly an American Indian or a First Person or an Indigenous Person, and they did not have Latin or any other kind of written language then. So did Ovid matter because he was Ovid or because he lived in Ancient Rome?

JP shouted, "TELL THEM WHAT YOU JUST DID TO EACH OTHER!""Um," I said."We kissed," the Duke said."That's kinda gay," Keun said."I AM A GIRL.""Yeah, I know, but so is Tobin," Keun said.

Sorry," I said to the Duke."Eh, it's not your fault. It's Carla's fault. You were turning the wheel. Carla just wasn't listening. I knew I shouldn't have loved her. She's like all the others, Tobin; as soon as I confess my love, she abandons me."I laughed. "I never abandoned you," I said patting on her back."Yeah, well, (a.) I never confessed my love to you, and (b.) I'm not even female to you.

If my public existence does anything worthwhile, hopefully it at least demystifies the author a bit, because I know when I was younger I felt like authors were like wizards or something. Turns out they're total muggles.

I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that’s made by one person, but that’s not true… Every reading of a book is a collaboration between the reader and the writer who are making the story up together.

I thought of the one thing about home that I missed, my dad's study with its built-in, floor-to-ceiling shelves sagging with thick biographies and the black leather chair that kept me just uncomfortable enough to keep from feeling sleepy as I read.

This is unbearable ... God. These books she'll never read. Her Life's Library.

I’m not up for laughing, but their laughter makes the room feel safer, so we begin to explore.

These are all direct quotes, except every time they use a curse word, I'm going to use the name of a famous American poet:'You Walt Whitman-ing, Edna St. Vincent Millay! Go Emily Dickinson your mom!''Thanks for the advice, you pathetic piece of E.E. Cummings, but I think I'm gonna pass.''You Robert Frost-ing Nikki Giovanni! Get a life, nerd. You're a virgin.''Hey bro, you need to go outside and get some fresh air into you. Or a girlfriend.'I need to get a girlfriend into me? I think that shows a fundamental lack of comprehension about how babies are made.

Why is being a nerd so bad? saying " I noticed you're a nerd is like saying hey, I noticed you'd rather be intelligent that stupid, that you'd rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan

I don't suppose I can wear the flamingo tie," he said as he pulled on black socks. "It's a bit festive, given the occasion," I responded. "Can't wear it to the opera," said the Colonel, almost smiling. "Can't wear it to a funeral. Can't use it to hang myself. It's a bit useless, as ties go." I gave him a tie.

If people were rain, I was a drizzle and she was a hurricaine

Everything's uglier up close.Not you.

Hey,' he said, touching my waist. 'Hey. It's okay.' I nodded and wiped my face with the back of my hand. 'He sucks.' I nodded again. 'I'll write you an epilogue,' Gus said. That made me cry harder. 'I will,' he said. 'I will. Better than any sh*t that drunk could write. His brain is Swiss cheese. He doesn't even remember writing the book. I can write ten times the story that guy can. There will be blood and guts and sacrifice. An Imperial Affliction meets The Prince of Dawn. You'll love it.' I kept nodding, faking a smile, and then he hugged me, his strong arms pulling me into his muscular chest, and I sogged up his polo shirt a little but then recovered enough to speak.

NOTHING HAS EVER LOOKED LIKE THAT EVER IN ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY,” he said. His enthusiasm was adorable. I couldn’t resist leaning over to kiss him on the cheek.“Just so you know, I’m right here,” Mom said. “Sitting next to you. Your mother. Who held your hand as you took your first infantile steps.”“It’s friendly,” I reminded her, turning to kiss her on the cheek.“Didn’t feel too friendly,” Gus mumbled just loud enough for me to hear. When surprised and excited and innocent Gus emerged from Grand Gesture Metaphorically Inclined Augustus, I literally could not resist.

The sun was a toddler insistently refusing to go to bed.

If you dont' live a life in service of a greater good, you've gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good.

But what I want to know is, is there a you independent of circumstances? Is there a way-down-deep me who is an actual, real person, the same person if she has money or not, the same if she goes to this school or that school? Or am I only a set of circumstances?-Aza

Love is always a miracle, everywhere, every time.

The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never get struck by lightning, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us.

No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can't go all the way around.

My heart is really pounding," I said. "That's how you know you're having fun.

I am in love with you, and I am not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things.

Photographs are just light and time" - Aza Holmes

In my opinion, actual heroism, like actual love, is a messy, painful, vulnerable business—and I wanted to try to reflect that.

And yet still I worried. I like being a person. I wanted to keep at it. Worry is yet another side effect of dying.

I felt the worry start to snatch at my breath when I finished talking.

Because you simply cannot draw these things out forever. At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid and it hurts, but then it’s over and you’re relieved.

The thing is that it could never again feel natural to talk to her

we need never be hopeless because we can never be irreparably broken