As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We were very different, and we disagreed about a lot of things, but he was always so interesting, you know?
The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.
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.
You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.
At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
Just move to the Internet, its great here. We get to live inside where the weather is always awesome.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
If you want the rainbow, you have to deal with the rain.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When she fucked up all those years ago, just a little girl terrified into paralysis, she fell onto the enigma of herself.
Last words are always harder to remember when no one knows that someone’s about to die.
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.
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.
I was not religious, but I liked rituals. I liked the idea of connecting an action with remembering.
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.
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.
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.
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
They love their hair because they’re not smart enough to love something more interesting.
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.
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.
Nerd life is just so much better than regular life.
Was it animal pee or human pee? Someone asked.How would I know? What, am I an expert in the study of pee?
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.
I’m telling you, Augustus Waters talked so much that he’d interrupt you at his own funeral.
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.
AHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!’ he screamed.’So that’s Sara,’ I said.’Yes.”She seems nice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Great books help you understand and they help you feel understood.
The opportunity of studying history, is the opportunity to experience empathy.
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…
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
Apparently, the world is not a wish-granting factory.
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.
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.
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.
this is the rough part, okay? so just stay tuned for the good part. i promise it’ll come soon.
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.
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.
I think the future deserves our faith. But it is hard to argue with Emily Dickinson.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Words are not static.Language shape our memories, and it is also shaped by our memories.
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.
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
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.
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.
So I let her go, too. And I’m sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to.Takumi
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
…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.
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.
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 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?
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
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.
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.
We bring the fucking rain Q, not the scattered showers.
Paper Towns for a Paper Girl, who wants to think and read clearly
I don’t understand why you’re so obsessed with figuring out everything that happens here, like we have to unravel every mystery.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.
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?
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.
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.
And the moral of the story is that you don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.
On some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are.
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
…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.
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.
Oh, I wouldn’t mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.
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
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
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!
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.
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.
As a child I was an inveterate liar. As opposed to now, I am a Novelist.
As he read, I feel in love the way you fall asleep: slow, and then all at once.
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.
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
We have to forgive to survive in this labyrinth [of suffering]
We need never to be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken.
…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.
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
Life tries to crush her, but only succeeded in making a diamond.
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.
We are not as frail as the strings would make us believe.
I’m a grenade, I just want to stay away from people and read books, and think…
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 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.
It became a weekend of reading, of trying to see her in the fragments of the poem she’d left for me.
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.
Be present in this class. And then, when it’s over, be present out there.
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.
… going out late at night and laying in the dewy field and reading a Kurt Vonnegut book by moonlight.
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?
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.
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.
Patients are almost always preceded by their parents, because no matter how fast an ambulance can drive, terrified parents can drive faster.
Both my parents are therapists, which means that I am really goddamned well adjusted.
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.
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
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.
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..
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.
I don’t think you’re dying,” I said. “I think you’ve just got a touch of cancer.He smiled. Gallows humor.
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.
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.
The afternoon light brightening the green in her eyes, her tan skin the last memory of fall
I didn’t know what to say to her – I was caught in a love triangle with one dead side.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If people were rain, I was a drizzle and she was a hurricaine
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.
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.
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
That didn’t happen, of course. Things never happenedlike I imagined them.
If the inevitably of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.
You and I are just kids. We’ve got the best and the worst of it in front of us
Maybe life is not about accomplishing some bullshit markers.
… if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.
Oh, Wikipedia, with your tension between those who would share knowledge and those who would destroy it.
You put the thing that does the killing between your teeth, but you never give it the power to kill you
It´s a metaphor: you see, you put the killing thing right between your teeth,you just don’t give it the power to do it’s killing.
People are supposed to care. It’s good that people mean something to you, that you miss people when they’re gone.
I’m really not up for answering any questions that start with how, when, where, why, or what.
Because personally I think mattering is a piss-poor idea. I just want to fly under the radar, because when you start to make yourself into a big deal, that’s when you get shot down. The bigger a deal you are, the worse your life is.
I don’t think your missing pieces ever go inside you again once they go missing.
That doesn’t sound like my Margo”, she said, and I thought of my Margo, and all of us looking at her reflection in different funhouse mirrors.
If we’d put them in a vase in the living room, they would have been everyone’s flowers. I wanted them to be mt flowers.
Big, ugly homes for big, ugly people,’ I told Margo as we pulled into Casavilla.’No shit. If I ever end up being the kind of person who has one kid and seven bedrooms, do me a favor and shoot me.
It seemed like forever ago, like we’ve had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.
You had been a paper boy to me all these years – two dimensions as a character on the page and two different, but still flat, dimensions as a person. But that night you turned out to be real.
In our hyper-secular world, worship is still inevitable. But it is vital to remember that our gods don’t choose us, we choose them.
I glanced again. He was still watching me.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.
Mia,’ she whispered. I turned around. ‘What?’ I whispered back.She smiled at me a little. ‘LEEERRROOOY JEEENNKKIINNNSS!’ she shouted, then spun around and ran toward the Z’s in the lighting section.
Which got me to wondering whether it’s possible to learn how to be a person in a world where all the people are dead.
He wanted to draw out the moment before the moment- because as good as kissing feels, nothing feels as good as the anticipation of it.
Love is always a miracle, everywhere,every time. But for us, it’s a little different. I don’t want to say it’s more miraculous,…It is though.
Love is always a miracle, everywhere, every time. But for us, it’s a little different.
Love is always a miracle, everywhere,every time. But for us, it’s a little different. I don’t want to say it’s more miraculous…Our miracle is different because people say it’s impossible.
I always felt like you had to be important to have enemies – Q
This squirrel is inadequately afraid of humans! Squirrel, I am a threat to you! We are enemies! Please get off my bench! Oh, god! Oh, god! Don’t touch me—oh, god!
You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world…but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.
Right, except I’m not going to lie to my mom, because what kind of bastard lies to his own mother?
It’s like she thinks my job is to please her, and that should be my dearest wish, and when I don’t please her – I get shut out.
The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of a sentence.
What’s that?””The laundry basket?””No, next to it.””I don’t see anything next to it.””It’s my last shred of dignity. It’s very small.
It’s hard as hell to hold on to 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.
It’s hard as hell to hold on to your dignity when the risen sun is too bright in your losing eyes
I believe humans have souls, and I believe in the conservation of souls.
Either write something worth reading, or do something worth writing.
I always like routine. I suppose I never found boredom very boring.
I liked that he was a tenured professor in the Department of Slightly Crooked Smiles with a dual appointments in the Department of Having a Voice that Made My Skin Feel More Like Skin.
A nonhot boy stares at you and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy…well.
In the best conversations, you don’t even remember what you talked about, only how it felt. It felt like we were in some place your body can’t visit, some place with no ceiling and no walls and no floor and no instruments
Thank you for letting me hijack your wish’, I said.’Thank you for wearing that dress which is like whoa,” he said.
the world wasn’t made for us, we were made for the world
Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness. Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of dying.
I’ll give you my strength if I can have your remission.
You gave me a forever within the numbered days and I’m grateful.
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 Grace, with a predetermined winner.
There is only one thing in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you’re sixteen, and that’s having a kid who bites it from 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 with a predetermined winner
But of course there is always a hamartia and yours is that oh, my God, even though you HAD FREAKING CANCER you give money to a company in exchange for the chance to acquire YET MORE CANCER.
But it’s not a cancer book, because cancer books suck.
Osteosarcoma sometimes takes a limb to check you out. The, if it like you, it takes the rest.
When you go to a great concert, you feel this arc, almost like the music of a well-chosen set takes you on this trip through emotions and through various forms of intellectual engagement.