John Green

“She spoke to him in a language that, no matter how hard you studied it, could not be completely understood.”

“She was nothing but good and I was nothing but bad, but then she died, and I didn't.”

“She never liked me much, but she sure loved me”

“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.”

“I don't know the word for the feeling if there is one, but it's that feeling you get - or I hope you get it, anyway - when you realize the smallness of you, and the largeness of Everything Else. I'm not saying God necessarily. I'm saying you're outside at night and it's raining and you don't have an umbrella and you're running to get inside but then you stop and maybe you hold your hands palms up and feel the rain pound against your fingerprints and soak through your clothes and your wet hair against your neck and you realize how amazing it is while the thunder cracks.”

“Admittedly, I am only seventeen now. But some years are longer than others.”

“Like, you're never alone here. But also, you're never with people. It's possible this isn't a hospital-specific problem, come to think of it.”

“Children's hospitals are not designed for teenagers.”

“And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it.”

“If by that you mean that I dislike celebrity magazines, prefer food to anorexia, refuse to watch TV shows about models, and hate the color pink, then yes. I am proud to be not really a girl.”

“a taste so profound and complex that it can't even be compared to other tastes, only to emotions. Cheesy waffles, I was thinking, tastes like love without the fear of love's dissolution.”

“In the end, what you do isn't going to be nearly as interesting or important as who you do it with.”

“In short, we are all goin.”

“It was psychological trick called empathic listening. You say what the person is feeling so they feel understood.”

“I'm 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 of He is God.”

“She said 'I love you' as if it were a secret, and an immense one.”

“We are now as I wish we could be then.”

“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 listening exposes you even more than it exposes the people you're trying to listen to.”

“This is what I liked most about my friends: just sitting around and telling stories. Window stories and mirror stories.”

“Nothing is as boring as other people's dreams.”

“Every paper girl needs at least one string.”

“I don't really understand the point of crying. Also, I feel that crying is almost- like, aside from deaths of relatives or whatever- totally avoidable if you follow two very simple rules: 1. Don't care too much. 2. Shut up. Everything unfortunate that has ever happened to me has stemmed from failure to follow one of the rules.”

“How did scrambled eggs get stuck with breakfast exclusivity? You can put bacon on a sandwich without anyone freaking out. But the moment your sandwich has an egg, boom, it's a breakfast sandwich.”

“I realized that my eyes were closed and opened them. Augustus was staring at me, his blue eyes closer to me than they'd ever been, and behind them, a crowd of people three deep had sort of circled around us. They were angry, I thought. Horrified. These teenagers, with their hormones, making out beneath a video broadcasting the shattered voice of a former father.I pulled away from Augustus, and he snuck a peck onto my forehead as I stared down at my Chuck Taylors.And then they started clapping. All the people, all these adults, just started clapping, and one shouted "Bravo!" in a European accent. Augustus, smiling, bowed. Laughing, I curtsied ever so slightly, which was met with another round of applause.”

“And then we were kissing. My hand let go of the oxygen cart and I reached up for his neck, and he pulled me up by my waist onto my tiptoes. As his parted lips met mine, I started to feel breathless in a new and fascinating way. The space around us evaporated, and for a weird moment I really liked my body, this cancer-ruined thing I'd spent years dragging around suddenly seemed worth the struggle, worth the chest tubes and PICC lines and the ceaseless bodily betrayal of the tumors.”

“Is the labyrinth living or dying? Which is he trying to escape—the world or the end of it?”

“Nothing to be gained by worrying between now and then.”

“Good friends are hard to find and impossible to forget.”

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

“Yes, it's difficult to ascertain whether he is trying to arouse her or perform a breast exam.”

“I had a PET scan scheduled in a couple weeks. If something was wrong, I'd find out soon enough. Nothing to be gained by worrying between now and then.And yet still I worried. I liked being a person. I wanted to keep at it. Worry is yet another side effect of dying.”

“Best day of my life hasn't happened yet. But I know it. I see it every day. The best day of my life is the day I buy my mom a huge fucking house. And not just like out in the woods, but in the middle of Mountain Brook, with all the Weekday Warriors' parents. With all y'all's parents. And I'm not buying it with a mortgage either. I'm buying it with cash money, and I am driving my mom there, and I'm going to open her side of the car door and she'll getout and look at this house—this house is like picket fence and two stories and everything, you know—and I'm going to hand her the keys to her house and I'll say, 'Thanks.' Man, she helped fill out my application to this place. And she let me come here, and that's no easy thing when you come from where we do, to let your son go away to school. So that's the best day of my life.”

“Yeah, well. If you're staying here in hopes of making out with Alaska, I sure wish you wouldn't. If you unmoor her from the rock that is Jake, God have mercy on us all. That would be some drama, indeed. And as a rule, I like to avoid drama.""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." And he was right.”

“I don't know whether it was the general anxiety of being on a date (albeit one with my would-be date sitting fivepeople away from me) or the specific anxiety of having the Beast stare in my direction, but for some reason, I tookoff running after Takumi. I thought we were in the clear as we began to round the corner of the bleachers, butthen I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a cylindrical orange object getting bigger and bigger, like a fastapproachingsun.I thought: / think that is going to hit me.I thought: J should duck.But in the time between when something gets thought and when it gets done, the ball hit me square across theside of the face. I fell, the back of my head slamming against the gym floor. I then stood up immediately, as ifunhurt, and left the gym.Pride had gotten me off the floor of the gym, but as soon as I was outside, I sat down."I am concussed," I announced, entirely sure of my self-diagnosis."You're fine," Takumi said as he jogged back toward 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 okay?""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 onto Lara's pants.”

“And then we heard a branch break. It might have been a deer, but the Colonel busted out anyway. A voice directly behind us said, "Don't run, Chipper," and the Colonel stopped, turned around, and returned to us sheepishly.The Eagle walked toward us slowly, his lips pursed in disgust. He wore a white shirt and a black tie, like always.He gave each of us in turn the Look of Doom."Y'all smell like a North Carolina tobacco field in a wildfire," he said.We stood silent. I felt disproportionately terrible, like I had just been caught fleeing the scene of a murder.Would he call my parents?"I'll see you in Jury tomorrow at five," he announced, and then walked away. Alaska crouched down, picked up the cigarette she had thrown away, and started smoking again. The Eagle wheeled around, his sixth sense detecting Insubordination To Authority Figures. Alaska dropped the cigarette and stepped on it. The Eagle shook his head, and even though he must have been crazy mad, I swear to God he smiled. "He loves me," Alaska told me as we walked back to the dorm circle. "He loves all y'all, too. He just loves the school more. That's the thing. He thinks busting us is good for the school and good for us. It's the eternal struggle, Pudge. The Good versus the Naughty.""You're awfully philosophical for a girl that just got busted," I told her."Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war.”

“Like any good teacher, she tolerated little dissension. She smoked and talked and ate for an hour without stopping, and I scribbled in my notebook as the muddy waters of tangents and cosines began to clarify. But not everyone was so fortunate.As Alaska zipped through something obvious about linear equations, stoner/baller Hank Walsten said, "Wait, wait. I don't get it.""That's because you have eight functioning brain cells.""Studies show that marijuana is better for your health than those cigarettes," Hank said.Alaska swallowed a mouthful of french fries, took a drag on her cigarette, and blew smoke across the table at Hank. "I may die young," she said. "But at least I'll die smart. Now, back to tangents.”

“Unfortunately for the Culver Creek Nothings, we weren't playing the deaf-and-blind school. We were playing some Christian school from downtown Birmingham, a team stocked with huge, gargantuan apemen with thick beards and a strong distaste for turning the other cheek.”

“He loves weed like Alaska loves sex," the Colonel said. "This is a man who once constructed a bong using only the barrel of an air rifle, a ripe pear, and an eight-by-ten glossy photograph of Anna Kournikova. Not the brightest gem in the jewelry shop, but you've got to admire his single-minded dedication to drug abuse.”

“Why do you smoke so damn fast?" I asked.She looked at me and smiled widely, and such a wide smile on her narrow face might have looked goofy were it not for the unimpeachably elegant green in her eyes. She smiled with all the delight of a kid on Christmas morning and said, "Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.”

“But you have to be careful which metaphor you use, because it matters... The metaphors have implications. Do you know what I mean?”

“There's nothing bigger in life than the little things.”

“escuchar en silencio” es mi estrategia social en general.”

“Ours was an epic love story, and I won't be able to get more than a sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears. Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because-like all real love stories-it will die with us, as it should.”

“In the dark beside me, she smelled of sweat and sunshine and vanilla,”

“Crying adds something: crying is you, plus tears. But the feeling Colin had was some horrible opposite of crying. It was you, minus something. He kept thinking about one word - forever - and felt the burning ache just beneath his rib cage.”

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

“It's Keun. He wants to be put on speaker. He's being weird.""Fancy that," said the Duke. "Next you'll tell me that the sun is a mass of incandescent gas.”

“And even though he felt pitiful and ridiculous, he didn't want it to end, because he knew the absence of her would hurt more than any breakup ever could.”

“Dumpers may not always be the heartbreakers, and the Dumpees may not always be the heartbroken. But everyone has a tendency.”

“She did not need to fold into herself and self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, "Teenagers think the hate 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.”