John Green

“I think maybe the reason I have spent most of my life being afraid is that I have been trying to prepare myself to train my body for real fear when it comes. But I am not prepared.”

“In retrospect Hank I don't know why I spent four years writing this book when I could have just made a hit sing-a-ma-jig album.”

“Even with everything broken and decided inside her she couldn't quite allow herself to disappear for good.”

“I always liked routine. I suppose I never found boredom very boring. I doubted I could explain it to someone like Margo but drawing circles through life struck me as a kind of reasonable insanity.”

“Don't worry. Worry is useless. I worried anyway”

“I don't think your missing pieces ever fit inside you again once they go missing.”

“A Margo for each of us--and each more mirror than window.”

“The truth resists simplicity.”

“Do you know why I left America, Lidewij? So that I would never again have to encounter Americans.""But you are an American.""Incurably so, it seems.”

“I don't know how I look, but I know how I feel: Young. Goofy. Infinite.”

“I hate the rich snots here with a fervent passion I usually reserve only for dental work and my father.”

“When you stop wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you stop suffering when they do.”

“No," I said. And maybe it was only because Alaska couldn't hit the brakes and I couldn't hit the accelerator.”

“And it was just the three of us - three bodies and two people - the three who knew what had happened and too many layers between all of us too much keeping us from one another.”

“She's just playing a trick on us. This is just an Alaska Young Prank Extraordinaire. It's Alaska being Alaska, funny and playful and not knowing when or how to put on the brakes.”

“Ya think you's walkin' on water, but turns out you just got piss in your shoes.”

“Breaking up isn't something that gets done to you; its something that happens with you.”

“I go in and slip a note in Jane's locker, which I've gotten in the habit of doing. It's always just a line or two that I found from some poem in the gigantic poetry anthology my sophomore English taught me from. 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.”

“Issac:"I dislike living in a world without Augustus Waters."Computer: "I don't understand-"Issac: "Me neither. Pause”

“May I see you again?" he asked. There was an endearing nervousness in his voice. I smiled. "Sure.""Tomorrow?" he asked."Patience, grasshopper," I counseled. "You don't want to seem overeager. "Right, that's why I said tomorrow," he said. "I want to see you again tonight. But I'm willing to wait all night and much of tomorrow." I rolled my eyes. "I'm serious," he said. "You don't even know me," I said. I grabbed the book from the center console. "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 this book." He broke out into that goofy smile. "And you say we don't know each other.”

“Where is my chance to be somebody's Peter Van Houten?' He hit the steering wheel weakly, the car honking as he cried. He leaned his head back, looking up. 'I hate myself I hate myself I hate this I hate this I disgust myself I hate it I hate it I hate it just let me fucking die.”

“I kept thinking there were two kinds of adults: There were...miserable creatures who scoured the earth in search of something to hurt. And then there were people like my parents, who walked around zombically, doing whatever they had to do to keep walking around.”

“I thought at first she was just dead. Just darkness. Just a body being eaten by bugs. I thought about her alot like that, like someone's meal. What was her - green eyes, half a smirk, the soft curves of her legs - would soon be nothing, just the bones I never saw. 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 think that, sometimes, I think that maybe "the afterlife" is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make the time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just matter, and matter gets recycled.But ultimately I do not believe that she was just matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska's 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 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.”

“He kept thinking about one word—forever—and felt the burning ache just beneath his rib cage. It hurt like the worst ass-kicking he’d ever gotten.”

“You can't just make me different, and the leave. Because I was fine before.”

“Ask me if I give a shit.”

“Getting pissed wouldn't fix it. Damn it.”

“A woman so strong she burns heaven and drenches hell.”

“I try not to be scared, you know. But I still ruin everything. I still fuck up.”

“I don't understand why I screw everything up.”

“We can't love our neighbors till we know how crooked their hearts are.”

“I love you' really is the gateway drug of breaking up.”

“Cold one day, sweet the next; irresistibly flirty one moment, resistibly obnoxious the next.”

“Even though we fought, like, ninety-four percent of the time, I'm really sad.”

“I really care about her. I mean, we were hopeless. Badly matched. But still. I mean, I said I loved her.”

“Problem with you is that if you talk to her you'll 'uh um uh' your way to disaster.”

“You live for pretentious metaphors.”

“I kept thinking that it sounded like a dragon breathing in time with me, like I had this pet dragon who was cuddled up next to me and cared enough about me to time his breaths to mine. I was thinking about that as I sank into sleep.”

“Suffering can bend & break us. But it can also break us open to become the persons God intended us to be. It depends on what we do with the pain. If we offer it back to God, He will use it to do great things in us & through us, because suffering is fertile... it an grow new life.”

“The Degree to which I am blessed staggers me... the degree to which I take that for granted shames me.-Streetwalking with Jesus”

“those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be.”

“The snow may be falling in the winter of my discontent, but at least I've got sarcastic company.”

“Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.”

“Ninety-nine percent of the time, your parents never have to know, though. The school doesn't want your parents to think you became a fuckup here any more than you want your parents think you're a fuckup.”

“Things never happened like I imagined them.”

“That's why I'm going. So I don't have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.”

“I realized that all my life, my values were based upon typical middle-class American values: hard work, doing good, living well, owning things, following the rules & being the best I can be... but God clearly says, "those are not MY values. I value justice, mercy & humility.”

“All of us, poor & rich alike, have been conditioned by our upbringings. Impoverished men & women may become lulled into a state of "learned helplessness" without hope to change their lives. Likewise, the wealthy can walk in a state of "learned blindness" ignoring the desperation of the local & global poor.”

“I told Augustus the broad outline of my miracle: diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer when I was thirteen. (I didn’t tell him that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You’re a woman. Now die.)”

“There was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that’s one in five . . . so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.”