John Green

“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!”

“Were she better or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of the stars to cross...”

“I want to see you again tonight. But I'm willing to wait all night and much of tomorrow.”

“Thank luck and DNA.”

“I lit up like a Christmas tree, Hazel Grace”

“I missed 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.”

“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.”

“But monotony doesn't make for painlessness.”

“Nothing really good will ever happen to me if I stay in Gutshot; and maybe that's true. But nothing really bad will ever happen, either, and I'll take that bargain any day.”

“They're an impenetrable fortress of unknowability, really.”

“You know, we could just keep going. We don't have to stop.”

“Augustus: "I can still dominate your blind ass at Counterinsurgence,"Isaac: "I'm pretty sure all asses are blind,”

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

“So, I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them.”

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

“The chaplain has a good life, an easy life. He is well educated, modestly well-to-do, and awkwardly handsome. He has faced no particularly compelling struggle, aside from frequently being dumped by women he wished to marry. His friends and family are in good health. And, sometimes, when one is not blessed with crisis, one must manufacture it.”

“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.”

“It just goes to show, if you try to ruin someone's life, it only gets better.”

“Memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow”

“Everything that comes together falls apart”

“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”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“The idea of "the authentic self," and how everyone is always talking about "being yourself," and how when you're yourself you get friends or you get boyfriends, and until you're yourself you don't. It's a crazy idea, because who's self would you otherwise be being? That relationship between constructed identities and identities that feel authentic to you is really fascinating to me. I think about it a lot.”

“With every choice, something is gained and something is lost.'' - John Green”

“Did I help you toward a fate you didn't want, Alaska, or did I just assist in your willful self-destruction?”

“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.”

“The part I enjoy most is not the doing, but the noticing.”

“Everyone in this tale had 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 note, “The fault, dear Brutus, is no in our stars / But in ourselves.” Easy to say when you’re a Roman nobleman (or Shakespeare!), but there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.”

“Getting a life’ is something only a complete idiot could believe. Like you can just drive to a store and get a life. See it in its shiny box and look inside the plastic window and catch a glimpse of yourself in a new life and say, ‘Wow, I look much happier — I think this is the life I need to get!’, take it to the counter, ring it up, put it on your credit card. If getting a life was that easy, we’d be one blissed-out race.”

“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.”

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

“But what could I lose by continuing that had not already been lost?”

“I always had this secret suspicion that I was special.”

“If you go to the Rijksmuseum, which I really wanted to do- but who are we kidding, neither of us can walk through a museum. But anyway, I looked at the collection online before we left. If you were to go, and hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paintings of dead people. You'd see Jesus on the cross, and you'd see a dude getting stabbed in the neck, and you'd see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs. But Nor. One. Single. Cancer. Kid. Nobody biting it from the plague or smallpox or yellow fever or whatever, because there's no gory in illness. there is no meaning to it. There is no honour of dying of”

“Much of my life has been devoted to trying not to cry in front of people who love me, so I knew what Augustus was doing. You clench your teeth. You look up. You tell yourself that if they see you cry, it will hurt them, and you will be nothing but A Sadness in their lives, and you must not become a mere sadness, so you will not cry, and you say all of this to yourself while looking up at the ceiling, and then you swallow even though your throat does not want to close and you look at the person who loves you and smile.”

“At least it was instant. At least there wasn't any pain."I knew he was only trying to help, but he didn't get it.There was pain. A dul endless pain in my gut that wouldn't go away even when I knelt on the stingingly frozen tile of the bathroom, dry-heaving.”

“You're amazing, and I so want to be your boyfriend, because of what you just said, and also because that shirt makes me want to take you home and do unspeakable things while we watch live-action Sailor Moon videos”

“I'm just reveling in the glory of not having to hear the neediness and impotence of my own voice.”

“But the truth is that I had never wanted him to kiss me, not in the way you are supposed to want these things. I mean, he was gorgeous. I was attracted to him. I thought about him in that way, to borrow a phrase from the middle school vernacular. But the actual touch, the realized touch...it was all wrong.”

“I realize that this is not, like, boyish. I realize that properly speaking guys should only think about sex and the acquisition of it, and that they should run crotch-first toward every girl who likes them and etc. But: The part I enjoy most is not the doing, but the noticing. Noticing the way she smells like oversugared coffee, and the difference between her smile and her photographed smile, and the way she bites her lower lip, and the pale skin of her back. I just want the pleasure of noticing these things at a safe distance—I don’t want to have to acknowledge that I am noticing. I don’t want to talk about it or do stuff about it.”

“Por vezes as pessoas não compreendem as promessas que estão a fazer quando as fazem.”

“I like the strings. I always have. Because that's how it feels. But the strings make pain seem more fatal than it is, I think. We're not as frail as the strings would make us believe. And I like the grass, too. The grass got me to you, helped me to imagine you as an actual person. But we're not different sprouts from the same plant. I can't be you. You can't be me. You can imagine another well – but never quite perfectly, you know?”

“Isaac out of surgery. It went well. He's officially NEC.NEC meant "no evidence of cancer." A second text came a few seconds later. I mean, he's blind. So that's unfortunate.”

“You've gotta pick your battles in this world...”

“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.” 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.”

“You're too busy being you that you don't realize how utterly unprecedented you are.”

“The future will erase everything—there's no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion.”