John Green

“So dawn goes down today... Nothing gold can stay.-- Robert Frost”

“Our fearlessness shall be our secret weapon.”

“The risen sun too bright in her losing eyes.”

“standing in line is a form of oppression”

“I had a moral opposition to eating before dawn on the grounds that I was not a nineteenth-century Russian peasant fortifying myself for a day in the fields.”

“I told myself – as I’ve told myself before – that the body shuts down when the pain gets too bad, that consciousness is temporary, that this will pass. But just like always, I didn’t slip away. I was left on the shore with the waves washing over me, unable to drown.”

“When surprised and excited and innocent Gus emerged from Grand Gesture Metaphorically Inclined Augustus, I literally could not resist.”

“I got my wish, I suppose. I left my scar.”

“What a slut time is. She screws everybody.”

“You realize that trying to keep your distance from me will not lessen my affection for you," he said.”

“And I agreed, but still, she owed us an explanation. If she was up there, down there, out there, somewhere, maybe she would laugh.”

“That’s part of what I like about the book in some ways. It portrays death truthfully. You die in the middle of your life, in the middle of a sentence”

“Ognuno all'inizio è una nave inaffondabile. Poi ci succedono alcune cose: persone che ci lasciano, che non ci amano, che non capiscono o che noi non capiamo, e ci perdiamo, sbagliamo, ci facciamo male, gli uni con gli altri. E lo scafo comincia a creparsi. E quando si rompe non c'è niente da fare, la fine è inevitabile. Però c'è un sacco di tempo tra quando le crepe cominciano a formarsi e quando andiamo a pezzi. Ed è solo in quel momento che possiamo vederci, perchè vediamo fuori di noi dalle nostre fessure e dentro gli altri attraverso le loro.”

“The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention.”

“I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before his recurrence that I'd never grow old with Augustus Waters. But thinking about Lidewij and her boyfriend, I felt robbed. I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up that you can't make out the waves or any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could remember it. 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.”

“I don't believe in prom,' I reminded her as she rounded a corner. I expertly angled my raisin bran to accomodate the g-forces. I'd done this before.”

“I believe in that line from An Imperial Affliction. 'The risen sun too bright in her losing eyes.' That's God, I think, the rising sun, and the light is too bright and her eyes are losing but they aren't lost.”

“According to the conventions of the genre, Augustus Waters kept his sense of humor till the end, did not for a moment waiver in his courage, and his spirit soared like an indomitable eagle until the world itself could not contain his joyous soul.But this is the truth, a pitiful boy who desperately wanted not to be pitiful, screaming and crying, poisoned by an infected G-tube that kept him alive, but not alive enough.I wiped his chin and grabbed his face in my hands and knelt down close to him so that I could see his eyes, which still lived. 'I'm sorry. I wish it was like that movie, with the Persians and the Spartans.''Me too,' he said.'But it isn't,' I said.'I know,' he said.'There are no bad guys.''Yeah.''Even cancer isn't a bad guy really: Cancer just wants to be alive.”

“And so much depends, I told Augustus, upon a blue sky cut open by the branches of the trees above. So much depends upon the transparent G-tube erupting from the gut of the blue-lipped boy. So much depends upon the observer of the universe.”

“People will say it's sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it's not sad, Van Houten. It's triumphant. It's heroic. Isn't that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm.”

“Much of my life had been devoted to trying not to cry in front of people who loved 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.”

“That was the worst part about having cancer, sometimes: The physical evidence of disease separates you from other people.”

“I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?”

“His every syllable flirted. Honestly, he kind of turned me on. I didn't even know that guys could turn me on-not, like, in real life”

“Because you are beautiful. I enjoy looking at beautiful people, and I decided a while ago not to deny myself the simpler pleasures of existence”

“There is only one things in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you're sixteen, and that's having a kid who bites it from cancer.”

“I always felt like you had to be important to have enemies.”

“Margo's beauty was a kind of sealed vessel of perfection--uncracked and uncrackable.”

“Life has become the future. Every moment of your life is lived for the future.”

“I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is inprobably biased toward the consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it-or my observation of it-is temporary?”

“The weird thing about houses is that they almost always look like nothing is happening inside of them, even though they contain most of our lives. I wondered if that was sort of the point of architecture.”

“Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.”

“You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world...but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.”

“You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories, and we made the funny choice.”

“The pleasure of remembering had been taken from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing your co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before.”

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

“And that’s why he liked her, and loved her. She spoke to him in a language that, no matter how hard you studied it, could not be completely understood.”

“I guess I had been 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.)”

“All at once, I couldn’t figure out why I was methodically tossing a spherical object through a toroidal object. It seemed like the stupidest thing I could possibly be doing.”

“There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it.”

“Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness. Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of dying.”

“And I wondered if hurdlers ever thought, you know, 'This would go faster if we just got rid of the hurdles.”

“We are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be.”

“Karl Marx famously called religion 'the opiate of the masses'. Buddhism, particularly as it is popularly practiced, promises improvement through karma. Islam and Christianity promise eternal life to the faithful. And that is a powerful opiate, certainly, the hope of a better life to come. But there's a Sufi story that challenges the notion that people believe only because they need an opiate. Rabe'a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seen running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, 'I am 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 He is God.”

“I knew that time would now pass for me differently than it would for him—that I, like everyone in that room, would go on accumulating loves and losses while he would not. And for me, that was the final and truly unbearable tragedy: Like all the innumerable dead, he'd once and for all been demoted from haunted to haunter.”

“I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you.”

“Like Rabe'a, I didn't think people should believe in God because of heaven and hell. But I didn't feel a need to run around with a torch. You can't burn down a made-up place. ”

“We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations.”

“Ya'll smoke to enjoy. I smoke to die.”

“I didn't want to see them lower him into the ground in the spot he'd picked out with his dad, and I didn't want to see his parents sink to their knees in the dew-wet grass and moan in pain....”