John Green

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”

“I liked being a person. I wanted to keep at it.”

“Me: “I refuse to attend Support Group.”Mom: “One of the symptoms of depression is disinterest in activities.”Me: “Please just let me watch America’s Next Top Model. It’s an activity.”Mom: “Television is a passivity.”Me: “Ugh, Mom, please.”Mom: “Hazel, you’re a teenager. You’re not a little kid anymore. You need to make friends, get out of the house, and live your life.”Me: “If you want me to be a teenager, don’t send me to Support Group. Buy me a fake ID so I can go to clubs, drink vodka, and take pot.”Mom: “You don’t take pot, for starters.”Me: “See, that’s the kind of thing I’d know if you got me a fake ID.”Mom: “You’re going to Support Group.”Me: “UGGGGGGGGGGGGG.”Mom: “Hazel, you deserve a life.”

“Look, let me just say it: He was hot. A nonhot boy stares at you relentlessly and it is, at best, awkward and, at worst, a form of assault. But a hot boy . . . well.”

“I hadn’t been in proper school in three years. My parents were my two best friends. My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed.”

“Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.”

“Just remember that sometimes, the way you think about a person isn’t the way they actually are… People are different when you can smell them and see them up close…”

“But there was so much todo: cigarettes to smoke, sex to have, swings to swing on. I'll have more time for reading when I'm old and boring.”

“I began to swim, an armless silver mermaid, using only my hips to generate motion, until finally my ass scraped against the lake's mucky bottom. I turned then and used my hips and waist to roll three times, until I came ashore near a ratty green towel. They'd left me a towel. How thoughtful.”

“Because no one can catch the motherfucking fox.”

“She taught me everything I knew about crawfish and kissing and pink wine and poetry. She made me different.”

“Fuck Lara, fuck Jake because I do, Alaska Young, I do love you and what else matters but that.”

“He puts the killing thing in his mouth but doesn't give it the power to kill him.”

“My name is Hazel. Augustus Waters was the great sat-crossed love of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I won't be able to get more than a sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears. Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because-like all real love stories-it will die with us, as it should. I'd hoped that he'd be eulogizing me, because there's no one I'd rather have..." I started crying. "Okay, how not to cry. How am I-okay. Okay."I took a few deep breaths and went back to the page. "I can't talk about our love story, so I will talk about math. I am not a mathematician, but I know this: There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a Bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I'm likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful.”

“The thing about dead people... The thing is you sound like a bastard if you don't romanticize them, but the truth is... complicated, I guess.”

“The sun was a toddler insistently refusing to go to bed: It was past eight thirty and still light.”

“Do you know what Dom Pérignon said after inventing champagne? He called out to his fellow monks, 'Come quickly: I am tasting the stars.”

“I hated hurting him. Most of the time, I could forget about it, but the inexorable truth is this: They might be glad to have me around, but I was the alpha and the omega of my parents' suffering.”

“Throughout the book, she refers to herself as "the side effect," which is just totally correct. Cancer kids are essentially side effects of the relentless mutation that made the diversity of life on earth possible.”

“Can't wear it to the opera," said the Colonel, almost smiling. "Can't wear it to a funeral. Can't use it to hang myself. It's a bit useless, as ties go.”

“It was the immutable tango between the Dumper and the Dumpee: the coming and the seeing and the conquering and the returning home.”

“Pudge, what you must understand about me is that I am a deeply unhappy person.”

“I know so many last words. But I will never know hers.”

“It’s just that I learned a while ago that the best way to get people to like you is not to like them too much.”

“The French verb aimer has two meanings. 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 remember thinking that. You were dork chic before dork chic was chic.”

“If there’s one thing I know, it’s that there’s some people in this world who you can just love and love and love no matter what.”

“Straight and fast.”

“You smoke to enjoy it, I smoke to die.”

“I'd rather wonder than get answers I couldn't live with.”

“It always happened like this: he would look and look for the keys to Satan’s Hearse and then finally he’d just give up and say, “Fine. I’ll take the fugging bus,” and on his way out the door, he’d see the keys. Keys show up when you reconcile yourself to the bus; Katherines appear when you start to disbelieve the world contains another Katherine; and, sure enough, the Eureka moment arrived just as he began to accept it would never come.”

“Colin Singleton’s distance from his glasses made him realize the problem: myopia. He was nearsighted. The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible.”

“Well," Ben went on,"someone should just tell her to come on home, because she can find the world's largest balls right here in Orlando, Florida. They're located in a special display case known as 'my scrotum.'" Radar laughed, and Ben continued. "I mean seriously. My balls are so big that when you order french fries from McDonald's, you can choose one of four sizes: small, medium,large, and my balls.”

“All hurt is brain hurt.”

“In the contemporary world where things fall apart, and the centre cannot hold, you have to imagine a community where there is no centre. Hank, at the end of this year I started thinking that a lot of life is about doing things that don’t suck with people who don’t suck.”

“And the moral of the story is that you don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.”

“How can you seperate those things though? The people are the place is the people.”

“At some point, you gotta stop looking up at the sky, or one of these days you'll look back down and see that you floated away, too.”

“The true ninja doesn't make a splash at all.”

“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.”

“Either way,though, we must remember that this is a dangerous sport."Right, Colin thought. We have guns and the pigs have snouts. Dangerous, indeed.”

“How can you read and talk at the same time?” I asked.“Well, I usually can’t, but neither the book nor the conversation is particularly intellectually challenging.”

“And I put the latte down on a table, awash in the happy middle of my greatest adventure.”

“I realized it in waves and we held on to each other crying and I thought, God we must look so lame, but it doesn't matter much when you have just now realized, all the time later, that you are still alive.”

“I am a grenade," I said again. "I just want to stay away from people and read books and think and be with you guys because there's nothing I can do about hurting you: You're too invested, so just please let me do that, okay?"I'm going to go to my room and read for awhile, okay? I'm fine. I really am fine: I just want to go read for a while.”

“There were five others before they got to him. He smiled a little when his turn came. His voice was low, smoky, and dead sexy. “My name is Augustus Waters,” he said. “I’m seventeen. I had a little touch of osteosarcoma a year and a half ago, but I’m just here today at Isaac’s request.”“And how are you feeling?” asked Patrick.“Oh, I’m grand.” Augustus Waters smiled with a corner of his mouth. “I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up, my friend.”

“There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. 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. God knows that’s what everyone else does.”

“Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.”

“It's almost as if the way you imagine my dead self says more about you than it says about either the person I was or the whatever I am now.”

“I Hope I get pulled over, I'd like to see how a cop responds to a black man wearing a Confederate T-Shirt over a black dress”