John Green

“One of the reasons you're so terrified about figuring out what you're gonna do with your life is that you think you're only gonna be able to do one thing.”

“95% of romantic stories end with partners committing to each other because everything after that is just the blank terrifying morass of adulthood. This monotonous grind in which the only real excitement in your life is occasionally finding a truly ripe avocado at the grocery store.”

“People always get used to beauty, though.”“I haven’t gotten used to you just yet,”

“It’s not fair,” I said. “It’s just so goddamnedunfair.”“The world,” he said, “is not a wishgrantingfactory,”

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

“Is that what relationships become? A reduced version of the hurt, nothing else let in. It was more than that. I know it was more than that.”

“I tried--I swear I tried. But you didn't want to hear what I was saying, and I used that as an excuse to let it go on.”

“There are times when you just have to let it all out. All the anger, all the pain.”

“Who would you die for? Who would you wake up at five forty-five in the morning for even though you don't even know why he needs you?”

“Need is never a good basis for any relationship.”

“I think the idea of a 'mental heath day' is something completely invented by people who have no clue what it's like to have bad mental health. The idea that your mind can be aired out in twenty-four hours is kinds of like saying heart diseases can be cured if you eat the right breakfast cereal. Mental health days only exist for people who have the luxury of saying 'I don't want to deal with things today' and they can take the whole day off, while the rest of us are stuck fighting the fights we always fight, with no one really caring one way or another, unless we choose to bring a gun to school or ruin the morning announcements with a suicide.”

“I do, Augustus. I do.”

“I kept saying ‘always’ to her today, ‘always always always,’ and she j ust kept talking over me and not saying it back. It was like I wasalready gone, you know? ‘A lways’ was a promise! How can you j ust break the 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 the promise anyway. That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway.Don’t you believe in true love?”

“How about I call you when I finish this?”“But you don’t even have my phone number,” he said.“I strongly suspect you wrote it in the book.”He broke out into that goofy smile. “A nd you say we don’t know each other.”

“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.”

“She cannot possibly be dead, people do not just die”

“Até onde eu sei, você pode escolher a forma de contar uma história triste nesse mundo, e nós fomos pela opção divertida...”

“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.”

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

“The only one I'd like to talk about Augustus Waters' death is Augustus Waters.”

“It was kind of a beautiful day, finally real summer in Indianapolis, warm and humid--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.”

“You know how sometimes you see a really sexy baby? Wait that sounds fucked up.”

“Therewill come a time,” I said, “when all of us aredead. All of us. There will come a time whenthere are no human beings remaining to rememberthat anyone ever existed or that ourspecies ever did anything. There will be noone left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra,let alone you. Everything that we did andbuilt and wrote and thought and discoveredwill be forgotten and all of this”—I gesturedencompassingly—“will have been for naught.Maybe that time is coming soon and maybeit is millions of years away, but even if wesurvive the collapse of our sun, we will notsurvive forever. There was time before organismsexperienced consciousness, andthere will be time after. And if the inevitabilityof human oblivion worries you, I encourageyou to ignore it. God knows that’s whateveryone else does.”

“My fears?”“Yes.”“I fear oblivion,” he said without a moment’spause. “I fear it like the proverbialblind man who’s afraid of the dark.”

“Depression is a side effect of dying. (Canceris also a side effect of dying. Almosteverything is, really.)”

“He took a bite, swallowed. "God. If asparagus tasted like that all the time, I'd be vegetarian, too." Some people in a lacquered wooden boat approached us on the canal below. One of them, a woman with curly blond hair, maybe thirty, drank from a beer then raised her glass towards us and shouted something."We don't speak Dutch," Gus shouted back.One of the others shouted a translation: "The beautiful couple is beautiful.”

“And I wanted to know whether it is possible to live a hopeful life in a world riddled with ambiguity, whether we can find a way to go on even when we don't get answers to questions that haunt us”

“Ya'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.”

“Omnis cellula e cellula," he said again. "All cells come from cells. Every cell is born of a previous cell, which was born of a previous cell. Life comes from life. Life begets life begets life begets life begets life.”

“and even though I was in bed and he was in his basement, it really felt like we were back in that uncreated third space, which was a place I really liked visiting with him.”

“He liked the idea of coffee quite a lot—a warm drink that gave you energy and had been for centuries associated with sophisticates and intellectuals. But coffee itself tasted to him like caffeinated stomach bile.”

“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.”

“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!”

“Wat happens in the band room stays in the band room”

“I imagine runningto the creek and diving in headfirst, the creek so shallow that my hands scrape against the rocks, and my bodyslides into the cold water, the shock of the cold giving way to numbness, and I would stay there, float down withthat water first to the Cahaba River, then to the Alabama River, then to Mobile Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.”

“We shove the dirt over the book, tamping down the disturbed soil. The grass will grow back soon enough. It will be for us the beautiful uncut hair of graves.”

“You've forgotten how sunlight feels warm and rough against your skin like a kiss on the cheek from your dad, and the whole world is brighter and clearer than ever before.”

“we cant know better until knowing better is useless.”

“I'm on a roller coaster that only goes up," he said. "And it is my privilege and my responsibility to ride all the way up with you," I said.”

“Schmerz verlangt, gespürt zu werden.”

“I will get forgotten, but the stories will last. And so we all matter -- maybe less than a lot, but always more than none.”

“I feel like, like, how you matter is defined by the things that matter to you. You matter as much as the things that matter to you.”

“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 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.”

“It must be some book," she said as she knelt down next to the bed..."Did that boy give it to you?" She asked out of nowhere. "By 'it' do you mean herpes?" "You are too much," Mom said, "The book, Hazel. I mean the book.”

“From the front Rdar announces, "Don't you go talking bad about GoFast bars. Do you want me to stop this car?""Whenever I eat a GoFast bar," Ben says, "I'm always like, 'So this is what blood tastes like to mosquitoes.”

“I thought at first that she was just dead. Just darkness...I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would heat their homes with her and then she would be smoke billowing out of a smokestack, coating the atmosphere. I still that think that, sometimes, maybe "the afterlife" is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter...I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take her 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 there 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...energy is never created and never destroyed. We cannot be born and cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations... 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.”

“That's the mystery, isn't it? Is the labyrinth living or dying? Which is he trying to escape---the world or the end of it?”

“You are fairly smart," I said after a while."You are fairly good at compliments," he answered.”

“Oh no you didn't," Radar says when I show him why we're laughing. "Ben Starling, you better not have bought your token black friend a racist shirt.”