John Green

“And imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”

“So I know she forgives me, just as I forgive her. 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.”

“Do you know what it's like to work so hard to make sure everyone's happy, and to have not a single person recognize it?" - Tiny Copper (Will Grayson, Will Grayson)”

“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.”

“All salvation is temporary”

“Everything's uglier close up -Margo Roth Spiegelman”

“Ich hasste Sport. Ich hasste Sport, und ich hasste Sportler, und ich hasste Leute, die sich Sport ansahen, und ich hasste Leute, die Leute, die sich Sport ansahen, nicht hassten.”

“Okay is BURSTING with sensuality”

“Also, it was a bit hopeless," he said. "A bit defeatist.""If by defeatist you mean honest, then I agree.""I don't think defeatism is honest, " Dad answered. "I refuse to accept that.”

“Even though I hated the sympathy people felt toward me, I couldn't help but feel it toward him.”

“He was too smart for the kinds of solace I could offer.”

“His memory is compromised,' Lidewij said. 'If only my memory would compromise,' Van Houten responded.”

“Sorry, I was awash in the nobility of sacrifice. What were you saying?”

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

“Oh come on. He's not gonna survive 17 bullet wounds, is he? (Spoiler Alert: He does.)”

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

“Don't tell me you're one of those people who becomes their disease. I know so many people like that disheartening. Like, cancer is in the growth business, right?”

“The day passed as it always did—in slow motion, with a thousand plaintive glances at the clock. But now it was even more unbearable, because every minute I wasted in school was another minute in which I failed to find her.”

“And here it was, the great and terrible ten, slamming me again and again as I lay still and alone in my bed staring at the ceiling, the waves tossing me against the rocks then pulling me back out to sea so they could launch me again into the jagged face of the cliff, leaving me floating faceup on the water, undrowned.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I wanted..." I said."I know," he said. "I know. Apparently the world is not a wish-granting factory." That made me smile a little.”

“And then we were kissing.....The space around us evaporated, and for a weird moment I rally like my body; this cancer-ruined thing I'd spent years dragging around suddenly seemed worth the struggle,..”

“So much depends upon the transparent G-tube erupting from the gut of the blue-lipped boy. So much depends upon this observer of the universe"......."And you say you don't write poetry.”

“But the not-knowing would not keep me from caring, and I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart.”

“But then in middle school science, Mr. Martinez asked who among us had ever fantasized about living in the clouds, and everyone raised their hand. Then Mr. Martinez told us that up in the clouds the wind blew one hundred and fifty miles an hour and the temperature was thirty below zero and there was no oxygen and we’d all die within seconds.”“Sounds like a nice guy.”“He specialized in the murder of dreams, Hazel Grace.let me tell you. You think volcanoes are awesome? Tell that to the ten thousand screaming corpses at Pompeii. You still secretly believe that there is an element of magic to this world? It’s all just soulless molecules bouncing against each other randomly. Do you worry about who will take care of you if your parents die? As well you should, because they will be worm food in the fullness of time.”

“I am pretty unextraordinary, ~ Hazel Grace Lancaster.”

“My love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity, ~ Hazel Lancaster.”

“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.”

“Because it's kind of great, being an idea that everybody likes. But I could never be the idea to myself, not all the way. And Agloe is a place where a paper creation became real. A dot on the map became a real place, more real than the people who created the dot could never have imagined. I thought maybe the paper cutout of a girl could start becoming real here also. And it seemed like a way to tell that paper girl who cared about popularity and clothes and everything else: 'You are going to the paper towns. And you are never coming back.”

“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.”

“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.”

“That tastes like hope feels.”

“Because Margo knows the secret of leaving, the secret I have only just now learned; leaving feels good and pure only when you leave something important, something that mattered to you. Pulling life out by the roots. But you can't do that until your life has grown roots.”

“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.”

“You're funny, and you're smart, and you may show up late, but you always show up eventually.”

“I wanted to stop peeing but couldn't, of course. Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start.”

“This is the fear that made fish crawl out onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead.”

“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.”

“she called it a paper town. Like, you know, everything so fake and flimsy.”

“What's the pleasure?' I asked.'Planning, I guess. I don't know. Doing stuff never feels as good as you hope it will feel.”

“At least I carpe'd that one diem.”

“You see how fake it all is. It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town.”

“Oh my God I'm going to kill you!' But she was laughing.”

“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.”

“In the last weeks, we’d been reduced to spending our time together in recollection, but that was not nothing: 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.”

“My old man. He always knew just what to say.”

“I find it really offensive when people say that the emotional experiences of teenagers are less real or less important than those of adults.”

“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 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.”