John Green

“My regret was immediate and permanent and useless.”

“I told him they built a statue of Schultz, and then he said that a monument is cold comfort to a dead man, and then I said that the statue was built not for Schultz, but for us--to remind us how to be human.”

“But what did I have left to contribute? Just this? Just being the last known pair of truly human eyes to look up into the sky and experience the ␣eeting ␣ush of hope? Being a person, I had come to realize, is a communal activity. Dogs know how to be dogs. But people do not know how to be people unless and until they learn from other people.”

“The Romans knew it: quod me alit me extinguit, they said: That which nourishes me,extinguishes me.”

“It's embarrassing that we all just walk through life blindly accepting that scrambled eggs are fundamentally associated with mornings.”

“It was nice to spend time with someone so interesting. We were very different, and we disagreed about a lot of things, but he was always so interesting, you know?”

“I said I wouldn’t be the kind of boyfriend who reads her poetry, and I’m not, but I guess I am the kind of cheesy bastard who slips lines of poetry into her mornings.”

“He presses his forehead down on the podium and I watched his shoulders shake, and then finally, he said, "Goddamn it, Augustus, editing your own eulogy.""Don't swear in the Literal Heart of Jesus," Gus said.”

“You can imagine another well— but never quite perfectly, you know?”

“Pero diré esto: Cuando los científicos del futuro aparezcan en mi casa con ojos robot y me digan que los pruebe, yo les diré a los científicos que se larguen, porque no quiero ver un mundo sin él”

“Not following her is the hardest thing I've ever done.”

“Each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And these things happen—these people leave us, or don't love us, or don't get us, or we don't get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack open in places . . . Once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable . . . But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And it is only in that time that we can see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs.”

“Maybe by imagining these futures we can make them real, and maybe not, but either way we must imagine them.”

“This is what happens: somebody—girl usually—got a free spirit, doesn't get on too good with her parents. These kids, they're like tied-down helium balloons. They strain against the string and strain against it, and then something happens, and that string gets cut, and they just float away. And maybe you never see the balloon again . . . Or maybe three or four years from now, or three or four days from now, the prevailing winds take the balloon back home . . . But listen, kid, that string gets cut all the time.”

“I can't be you. You can't be me. You can imagine another well—but never quite perfectly, you know?”

“We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors . . . But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters.”

“Maybe we're grass—our roots so interdependent that no one is dead as long as someone is still alive.”

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

“But as for me: I must ask the wounded man where he is hurt, because I cannot become the wounded man. The only wounded man I can be is me.”

“When you leave a place, it's best to leave.”

“In the end it reveals a lot more about the person doing the imagining than it does about the person being imagined.”

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

“It's so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show anyone how we feel.”

“Before any of it could make sense, it had to be heard.”

“Maybe this time she wanted to be found, and to be found by me.”

“The easiest way to solve a mystery is to decide that there is no mystery to solve.”

“To be abandoned like that! Shut out when you most need to be loved.”

“No puedo hablar sobre nuestra historia de amor, así que hablaré sobre matemáticas. No soy una matemática, pero sé esto: hay infinitos números entre el 0 y el 1. Hay .1 y .12 y .112 y una infinita colección de otros. Por supuesto, hay una colección más grande de números entre 0 y 2 o entre 0 y un millón. Algunos infinitos son más grandes que otros. Un escritor que nos gustaba nos enseñó eso.Hay días, muchos de ellos, cuando me resiento por el infinito. Quiero más números de los que soy capaz de conseguir, y Dios, quiero más números para Augustus Waters que los que tiene. Pero, Gus, mi amor, no puedo decir cuán agradecida estoy por nuestro pequeño infinito. No lo comercializaría con el mundo. Me diste un para siempre dentro de los días numerados y estoy agradecida.”

“Soy como. Como. Soy como una granada, mamá. Soy una granada y en algún momento voy a estallar y me gustaría reducir al mínimo las víctimas, ¿de acuerdo?"Mi padre ladeó un poco la cabeza hacia un lado, como un perrito regañado."Soy una granada," le dije de nuevo. "Sólo quiero mantenerme alejada de la gente y leer libros, pensar y estar con ustedes porque no hay nada que yo pueda hacer sobre dañarlos; están demasiado involucrados, así que por favor, déjenme hacer eso, ¿está bien? No estoy deprimida. No necesito salir más. Y no puedo ser una adolescente normal, porque soy un granada.”

“She smiled with all the delight of a kid on Christmas morning and said, "Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die." - Alaska”

“I don’t find our relative insignificance disheartening at all: The main thing it tells me is that in a culture that worships celebrity and the purportedly extraordinary, ALL people are ordinary people. ALL people have the same responsibilities to themselves and to each other. Maybe the universe cares nothing for us, but WE care about each other. And most encouragingly, we care not just for our friends or family but for the whole enterprise of life—we care about strangers and about humpback whales and, most beautifully of all, 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.”

“In the beginning, she had hauted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again.”

“You should see it. V for Vendetta I mean. "I'll look it up."No. With Me. At my house. Now”

“I wondered whether I could find a Great Perhaps here at all or whether I had made a grand miscalculation.”

“I think my school friends wanted to help me through cancer, but they eventually found out that they couldn't. For one thing, there was no through.”

“I'm the motherfucking fox, no one can catch the fox." -Takumi”

“Damn it," he sighed. "How will I ever get out of this Labyrinth!”

“the pleasure was in seeing our strings cross and separate and then come back together”

“Doing stuff never feels as good as you hope it will feel.”

“I smiled. She smiled. I believed the smile.”

“Her beauty was a kind of sealed vessel of perfection—uncracked and uncrackable.”

“But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us.”

“I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart.”

“I loved her present tense.”

“Are there any Nazis left that I could hunt down and bring to justice?” Augustus asked while we leaned over the vitrines reading Otto’s letters and the gutting replies that no, no one had seen his children after the liberation.“I think they’re all dead. But it’s not like the Nazis had a monopoly on evil.”“True,” he said. “That’s what we should do, Hazel Grace: We should team up and be this disabled vigilante duo roaring through the world, righting wrongs, defending the weak, protecting the endangered.”Although it was his dream and not mine, I indulged it. He’d indulged mine, after all. “Our fearlessness shall be our secret weapon,” I said.“The tales of our exploits will survive as long as the human voice itself,” he said.“And even after that, when the robots recall the human absurdities of sacrifice and compassion, they will remember us.”“They will robot-laugh at our courageous folly,” he said. “But something in their iron robot hearts will yearn to have lived and died as we did: on the hero’s errand.”

“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.”

“I looked at her and she looked at me and we weren’t walking. We were just standing there, and her eyes were so interesting. Not in the usual way of being interesting, like the extremely blue or extremely big of flanked by obscenely long lashes or anything. What interested me about the Duke’s eyes was the complexity of the color- she always said they looked like the bottom of trash-can bins, a swirl of green and brown and yellow but she was underselling herself she always undersold herself. Christ it was hard to unthink”

“But I could always tell in her eyes if she got really pissed at me, and her eyes were still pretty smiley”

“I sat on the couch for a while as Augustus searched for his keys. His mom sat down next to me and said, “I just love this one, don’t you?” I guess I hadbeen looking toward the Encouragement above the TV, a drawing of an angel with the caption Without Pain, How Could We Know Joy?(This is an old argument in the field of Thinking About Suffering, and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries, but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate.) “Yes,” I said. “A lovely thought.”

“My favorite book, by a wide margin, was An Imperial Affliction, but I didn’t like to tell people about it. Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you withthis weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read thebook. And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can’t tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.It wasn’t even that the book was so good or anything; it was just that the author, Peter Van Houten, seemed to understand me in weird and impossible ways. An Imperial Affliction was my book, in the way my body was my body and my thoughts were my thoughts.”