John Green

“maybe she'd been scared of being paralyzed by fear again.”

“Scared isn't a good excuse. Scared is the excuse everyone has always used.”

“No woman should ever lie about another woman. You've violated the sacred covenant between women! How will stabbing one another in the back help women to rise above patriarchal oppression?”

“He was a dying man looking down on the surgeons trying to save him.”

“Given the final futility of our struggle, is the fleeting jolt of meaning that art gives us valuable? Or is the only value in passing the time as comfortable as possible? What should a story seek to emulate, Augustus? A ringing alarm? A call to arms? A morphine drip? Of course, like all interrogation of the universe, this line of inquiry inevitably reduces us to asking what it means to be human and whether—to borrow a phrase from the angst-encumbered sixteeen-year-olds you no doubt revile—there is a point to it all.”

“Imagine others complexly.”

“Like many people, I feel like celebrating. Remember this feeling. It is human, and can help us understand when others express bloodlust.”

“What I love about the sculpture is that it makes the bones that we are always walking and playing on manifest, like in a world that so often denies the reality of death and the reality that we are surrounded by and outnumbered by the dead. Here, is a very playful way of acknowledging that and acknowledging that and that always, whenever we play, whenever we live, we are living in both literal and metaphorical ways on the memory and bones of the dead.”

“that while the world wasn't built for humans, we were built for the world.”

“You’re arguing that the fragile, rare thing is beautiful simply because it is fragile and rare. But that’s a lie, and you know it.”

“You know how people are always saying your parents are always right? "Follow your parents' advice; they know what's good for you." And you know how no one ever listens to this advice, because even if it's true it's so annoying and condescending that it just make you want to go, like, develop a meth addiction and have unprotected sex with eighty seven thousand anonymous partners?”

“The things I would do to that boy. I mean, not now that I know you're interested in him. But, oh, sweet holy Lord, I would ride that one-legged pony all the way around the corral.""Kaitlyn," I said."Sorry. Do you think you'd have to be on top?""Kaitlyn," I said.”

“I was blind and heart broken and didn't want to do anything and Gus burst into my room and shouted, "I have wonderful news!" And I was like, "I don't really want to hear wonderful news right now," and Gus said, "This is wonderful news you want to hear," and I asked him, "Fine, what is it?" and he said, "You are going to live a good and long life filled with great and terrible moments that you cannot even imagine yet!”

“I'm not asexual. I'm arelationshipal.”

“But it was only hot outside, and generally I only walked outside between one air-conditioned place to another.”

“I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.”

“Maybe 'okay' will be our 'always”

“there is no best and no worst, ...those judgments have no real meaning because there is only what is”

“She loved mysteries so much that she became one.”

“But I will say this: When the scientists of the future show up at my house with robot eyes and they tell me to try them on, I will tell the scientists to screw off, because I do not want to see a world without him ...And then, having made my rhetorical point, I will put my robot eyes on, because I mean, with robot eyes you can probably see through girls’ shirts and stuff. Augustus, my friend, Godspeed.”

“Sometimes people don’t understandthe promises they’re making when they make them,” I said.Isaac shot me a look. “Right, of course.But you keep the promise anyway. That’swhat love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don’t you believe in true love?”

“Hazel has to realize that her mom was wrong when she said, “I won’t be a mother anymore.” The truth is, after Hazel dies (assuming she dies), her mom will still be her mom, just as my grandmother is still my grandmother even though she has died. As long as either person is still alive, that relationship survives. (It changes, but it survives.)”

“You can't dingleberry that! That's a flagrant misuse of the dingleberry!”

“He called out to his fellow monks,'Come quickly I am tasting stars.”

“Boys are much more likely to objectify girls bodies, while boys are seen by girls as whole people.”

“She has great breasts," the Colonel said without looking up from the whale."DO NOT OBJECTIFY WOMEN'S BODIES!" Alaska shouted.Now he looked up. "Sorry. Perky breasts.""That's not any better!”

“And we'll call you...hmmm. Pudge.""Huh?""Pudge," the Colonel said. "Because you're skinny. It's called irony, Pudge. Heard of it? Now, let's go get some cigarettes and start this year off right.”

“How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!" to a margin note written in her loop-heavy cursive: Straight & Fast.”

“The Colonel explained to me that 1. this was Alaska's room, and that 2. she had a single room because the girl who was supposed to be her roommate got kicked out at the end of last year, and that 3. Alaska had cigarettes, although the Colonel neglected to ask whether 4. I smoked, which 5. I didn't.”

“Augustus, perhaps you’d like to share your fears with the group.”“My fears?”“Yes.”“I fear oblivion,” he said without a moment’s pause. “I fear it like the proverbial blind man who’s afraid of the dark.”“Too soon,” Isaac said, cracking a smile.“Was that insensitive?” Augustus asked. “I can be pretty blind to other people’s feelings.”

“Nerd girls are the world’s most underutilized romantic resource. And guys, do not tell me that nerd girls are not hot because that shows a Paris Hilton-esque failure to understand hotness.”

“What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.”

“Right, except I'm not going to lie to my mom, because what kind of bastard lies to his own mother?”

“Because you're my friend, wingnut.”

“Random questions are the least random of all questions.”

“I make a gesture that is intended to convey, "Hey, no hurry, talk as long as you'd like," and probably actually conveys, "Hey, look at me! I have spastic hands.”

“I'm sitting her thinking, -God, I swear I will take a vow of silence and move to a monastery and worship you for all my days if you just this once provide me with an invisibility cloak, come on, come on, please please invisibility cloak now now now-. It's very possible that Jane is thinking the same thing, I have no idea, because she's not talking either, and I can't look at her on account of how I'm blinded by embarrassment.”

“Long week. Long month. Long life.”

“I just think if you don't say the honest thing, sometimes the honest thing never becomes true, you know, and I-”

“It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.”

“We all want to do something to mitigate the pain of loss or to turn grief into something positive, to find a silver lining in the clouds. But I believe there is real value in just standing there, being still, being sad.”

“This was not a place you go to live. It was a place you go to die."- Paper Towns”

“It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined.”

“Radar revs the engine as to say hustle, and we are running through the parking lot, Ben's robe flowing in the wind so that he looks vaguely like a dark wizard, except that his pale skinny legs are visible, and his arms hug plastic bags. I can see the back of Lacey's legs beneath her dress, her calves tight in midstride. I don't know how I look, but I know how I feel: Young. Goofy. Infinite.”

“My head was level with hers as we stared at each other from opposite sides of the glass. I don't remember how it ended - if I went to bed or she did. In my memory, it doesn't end. We just stay there, looking at each other, forever.”

“True love will triumph in the end—which may or may not be a lie, but if it is a lie, it's the most beautiful lie we have.”

“I can't be mad at you, you harmless scrawny bastard.”

“It's the eternal struggle, Pudge. The good versus the naughty. ...Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war.”

“He found himself thinking that maybe stories don't just make us matter to each other - maybe they're also the only way to the infinite mattering he'd been after for so long.And Colin thought: Because like say I tell someone about my feral hog hunt. Even if it's a dumb story, telling it changes other people just the slightest little bit, just as living the story changes me. An infinitesimal change. And that infinitesimal change ripples outward - ever smaller but everlasting. I will get forgotten, but the stories will last. And so we all matter - maybe less than a lot, but always more than some.”

“What matters to you defines your mattering.”