John Green

“You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful.”

“I hadn’t read a real series like that since I was a kid, and it was exciting to live again in an infinite fiction.”

“I tried to go to sleep with my headphones still on, but then after a while my mom and dad came in, and my mom grabbed Bluie from the shelf and hugged him to her stomach, and my dad sat down in my desk chair, and without crying he said, 'You are not a grenade, not to us. Thinking about you dying makes us sad, Hazel, but you are not a grenade. You are amazing. You can't know, sweetie, because you've never had a baby become a brilliant young reader with a side interest in horrible television shows, but the joy you bring us is so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness.''Okay,' I said.'Really,' my dad said. 'I wouldn't bullshit you about this. If you were more trouble than you're worth, we'd just toss you out on the streets.''We're not sentimental people,' Mom added, deadpan. 'We'd leave you at an orphanage with a note pinned to your pajamas.”

“No, I don’t think you’re gonna be single forever, and also I don’t understand your obsession with romantic love. There are other ways to have fulfilling relationships that can sustain you and make your life great and fun other than having a sexualized relationship. It’s not the only kind of fulfilling human interaction. So, even if you are single forever, that doesn’t mean that you’ve had some kind of failed life.”

“We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempts to survive our deaths...The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention.”

“I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend.”

“Keep your shit together," I whispered to my lungs.”

“I liked that he was a tenured professor in the Department of Slightly Crooked Smiles with a dual appointments in the Department of Having a Voice that Made My Skin Feel More Like Skin.”

“That's why I like you. Do you realize how rare it is to come across a hot girl who creates a adjectival version of the word pedophile? You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.”

“I imagined the Augustus Waters analysis of that comment: If I am playing basketball in heaven, does that imply a physical location of a heaven containing physical basketballs? Who makes the basketballs in question? Are there less fortunate souls in heaven who work in a celestial basketball factory so that I can play? Or did an omnipotent God create the basketballs out of the vacuum of space? Is this heaven in some kind of unobservable universe where the laws of physics don't apply, and if so, why in the hell would I be playing basketball when I could be flying or reading or looking at beautiful people or something else I actually enjoy? It's almost as if the way you imagine my dead self says more about you than either the person I was or whatever I am now.”

“It's just that most really good-looking people are stupid, so I exceed expectations.''Right, it's primarily his hotness,' I said.'It can be sort of blinding,' he said.'It actually did blind our friend Isaac,' I said.'Terrible tragedy, that. But can I help my own deadly beauty?''You cannot.''It is my burden, this beautiful face.''Not to mention your body.''Seriously, don't even get me started on my hot bod. You don't want to see me naked, Dave. Seeing me naked actually took Hazel Grace's breath away,' he said, nodding toward the oxygen tank.”

“I've gotten really hot since you went blind.”

“I want to leave a mark.But Van Houten: The marks humans leave are too often scars.”

“I could be worse, you know.""How?" I asked, teasing. "I mean, I have a work of calligraphy over my toilet that reads, 'Bathe yourself in the comfort of God's words,' Hazel. I could be way worse.""Sounds unsanitary," I said.”

“But it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he has Cassius note, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.”

“Only now that I loved a grenade did I understand the foolishness of trying to save others from my own impending fragmentation: I couldn’t unlove Augustus Waters. And I didn’t want to.”

“Love is keeping the promise anyway.”

“All salvation is temporary," Augustus shot back. "I bought them a minute. Maybe that's the minute that buys them an hour, which is the hour that buys them a year. No one's gonna buy them forever, Hazel Grace, but my life bought them a minute. And that's not nothing.”

“Is it still cool to go to the mall?' she asked. 'I take quite a lot of pride in not knowing what's cool,' I answered.”

“It's a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don't give it the power to do its killing.”

“I am in the midst of a soliloquy! I wrote this out and memorized it and if you interrupt me I will completely screw it up,' Augustus interrupted. 'Please to be eating your sandwich and listening.”

“I'll fight it. I'll fight it for you. Don't you worry about me, Hazel Grace. I'm okay. I'll find a way to hang around and annoy you for a long time.”

“There's not even real *popularity* at my school.""That," Coli said emphatically, "is a sentence that has only ever been spoken by popular people.”

“You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.”

“We’re as likely to hurt the universe as we are to help it, and we’re not likely to do either.”

“And lying there, amid the tall, still grass and beneath the star-drunk sky, listening to the just-this-side-of-inaudible sound of her rhythmic breathing and the noisy silence of the bullfrogs, the grasshoppers, the distant cars rushing endlessly on I-65, I thought it might be a fine time to say the Three Little Words.”

“I will not tell you our love story, because—like all real love stories—it will die with us, as it should.”

“The world went on, as it does, without my full participation, and I only woke up from the reverie when someone said my name.”

“I didn't want to look at them, so I looked away, and to look away was to look at Augustus.”

“What's that?""The laundry basket?""No, next to it.""I don't see anything next to it.""It's my last shred of dignity. It's very small.”

“I wanted to know that he would be okay if I died. I wanted to not be a grenade, to not be a malevolent force in the lives of people I loved.”

“He told me this while ripping through his duffel bag, throwing clothes into drawers with reckless abandon. Chip did not believe inhaving a sock drawer or a T-shirt drawer. He believed that all drawers were created equal and filled each with whatever fit. My mother wouldhave died.”

“Headline?" he asked."'Swing Set Needs Home,'" I said."'Desperately Lonely Swing Set Needs Loving Home,'" he said."'Lonely, Vaguely Pedophilic Swing Set Seeks the Butts of Children,'" I said.”

“The world is not a wish-granting factory.”

“And okay, fair enough, but there is this unwritten contract between author and reader and I think not ending your book kind of violates that contract.”

“She had the kind of fingers you want to interlace with your own.”

“His hand reached for her boob over her shirt and pawed at it, his palm still while his fingers moved around. I wondered if that felt good. Didn't seem like it would, but I decided to forgive Isaac on the grounds that he was going blind. The senses must feast while there is yet hunger and whatever."I think he's hurting her boob," I said."Yes, it's difficult to ascertain whether he is trying to arouse her or perform a breast exam.”

“We are literally in the heart of Jesus," he said. "I thought we were in a church basement, but we are literally in the heart of Jesus.""Someone should tell Jesus," I said. "I mean, it's gotta be dangerous, storing children with cancer in your heart.""I would tell Him myself," Augustus said, "but unfortunately I am literally stuck inside of His heart, so He won't be able to hear me.”

“So here's how it went in God's heart: The six or seven or ten of us walked/wheeled in, grazed at a decrepit selection of cookies and lemonade, sat down in the Circle of Trust, and listened to Patrick recount for the thousandth time his depressingly miserable life story-how he had cancer in his balls and they thought he was going to die but he didn't die and now here he is, a full-grown adult in a church basement in the 137th nicest city in America, divorced, addicted to video games, mostly friendless, eking out a meager living by exploiting his cancertastic past, slowly working his way toward a master's degree that will not improve his career prospects, waiting, as we all do, for the sword of Damocles to give him the relief that he escaped lo those many years ago when cancer took both of his nuts but spared what only the most generous soul would call his life.AND YOU TOO MIGHT BE SO LUCKY!”

“I thought of us lying down on some grassy patch of SeaWorld together, me on my back and she on her side with her arm draped against me, her head on my shoulder, facing me. Not doing anything - just lying there together beneath the sky, the night here so well lit that it drowns out the stars. And maybe I could feel her breathe against my neck, and maybe we could just stay there until morning and then the people would walk past as they came into the park, and they would see us and think that we were tourists, too, and we could just disappear into them.”

“No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can't go all the way around.”

“Sometimes people don't understand the promises they're making when they make them.”

“My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed.”

“The future will erase everything--there's no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible.”

“She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth.”

“At the end, we brought her to New York, where I was living, for a series of experimental tortures that increased the misery of her days without increasing the number of them.”

“Like all sick children," he answered dispassionately, "you say you don't want pity, but your very existence depends upon it.”

“We just sat there quiet for a long time, which was fine, and I was thinking about way back in the very beginning in the Literal Heart of Jesus...”

“We sat out there in silence for a minute and then Gus said, " I wish we had that swing set sometimes.""The one from my backyard?""Yeah. My nostalgia is so extreme that I am capable of missing a swing my butt never actually touched.""Nostalgia is a side effect of cancer," I told him."Nah, nostalgia is a side effect of dying," he answered. Above us, the wind blew and the branching shadows rearranged themselves on our skin. Gus squeezed my hand. "It is a good life, Hazel Grace.”

“Ma'am," Augustus said, nodding toward her, "Your daughter's car has just been deservingly egged by a blind man. Please close the door and go back inside or we'll be forced to call the police.”