John Green

“God, it’s over. Takumi, you gotta stop stealing other people’s problems and get some of your own.”

“Traffic's not too bad on Sheridan, and I'm cornering the car like it's the Indy 500, and we're listening to my favorite NMH song, "Holland, 1945," and then onto Lake Shore Drive, the waves of Lake Michigan crashing against the boulders by the Drive, the windows cracked to get the car to defrost, the dirty, bracing, cold air rushing in, and I love the way Chicago smells—Chicago is brackish lake water and soot and sweat and grease and I love it, and I love this song, and Tiny's saying I love this song, and he's got the visor down so he can muss up his hair a little more expertly.”

“I came here looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends and a more-than-minor life..”

“The venn diagram of boys who don’t like smart girls and boys you don’t wanna date is a circle.”

“Life is a lot like pizza…But in fact, Hank, the fundamental thing that all critical reading does is reveal to us there are not easy definitions that distinguish us from them. Reading with an eye toward metaphor allows us to become the person we’re reading about while reading about them. That’s why there are symbols in books and why your English teacher deserves your attention. Ultimately it doesn’t matter if the author intended a symbol to be there because the job of reading is not to understand the author’s intent. The job of reading is to use stories as a way into other people as we see ourselves, and when we do that we can look out at the world and see a giant endless set of beautiful variations of pizzas; the whole world composed of billions of beautiful, delicious pizzas.”

“someday no one will remember that she ever existed, i wrote in my notebook, and then, or that i did. because memories fall apart, too. and then you’re left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow.”

“I wanted to be one of those people who have streaks to maintain, who scorch the ground with their intensity. But for now, at least I knew such people, and they needed me, just like comets need tails.”

“It's hard to believe in coincidence, but it's even harder to believe in anything else.”

“I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and 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.”

“And then I was asleep. That deep, can-still-taste-her-in-my-mouth sleep, that sleep that is not particularly restful but difficult to wake up from all the same.”

“One of the Great Rules of Economics According to John GreenIf you are rich, you have to be an idiot not to stay rich. And if you are poor, you have to be really smart to get rich.”

“We didn't have sex. We never got naked. I never touched her bare breast, and her hands never got lower than my hips. It didn't matter. As she slept, I whispered, "I love you, Alaska Young.”

“That's absolutely true, about the eight glasses a day. There's no reason whatsoever to drink eight glasses of water a day unless you, for whatever reason, particularly like the taste of water. Most experts agree that unless there's something horribly wrong with you, you should just drink water whenever you're - get this - thirsty.”

“I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can't due to deadness.”

“I didn't know what to say to her - I was caught in a love triangle with one dead side.”

“I jog through the halls and then go upstairs to Jane’s locker and carefully slip the note I wrote last night through the vent:To: The Locker HoudiniFrom: Will GraysonRe: An Expert in the Field of Good Boyfriends?Dear Jane,Just so you know: e. e. cummings cheated on both of his wives. With prostitutes.Yours,Will Grayson”

“I hated cranberry sauce, but for some reason my mom persisted in her lifelong belief that it was my very favorite food, even though every single Thanksgiving I politely declined to include it on my plate.”

“Something about telling that story made my gut grow back together."What?"Oh, nothing. Just thinking out loud."That's who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of."The people who've been in your secret hiding places."The people you bite your thumb in front of."Hi."Hi."..."..."Wow. My first Lindsey."My second Colin."That was fun. Let's try it again."Sold."..."..."..."...”

“Oh, Wikipedia, with your tension between those who would share knowledge and those who would destroy it.”

“All sorts of yayness floods my brain. Love is such a drug.”

“And I wanted to tell her that the pleasure for me wasn't planning or doing or leaving; the pleasure was in seeing our strings cross and separate and then come back together.”

“Lady and gentleman, when my parents left Korea with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the considerable wealth they had amassed in the shipping business, they had a dream. They had a dream that one day amid the snowy hilltops of western North Carolina, their son would lose his virginity to a cheerleader in the woman's bathroom of a Waffle House just off the interstate. My parents have sacrificed so much for this dream! And that is why we must journey on, despite all trials and tribulations! Not for me and least of all for the poor cheerleader in question, but for my parents and indeed for all immigrants who came to his great nation in what they themselves could never have: CHEERLEADER SEX.”

“I realize that they giggle and I actually laugh, that they show their cleavage and I have none to show, but just so you know, I am also a girl. I'm one of the three wise MEN. And it's gay to think that James Bond is hot.”

“We just did an awesome job of not dying.”

“I responded to this development with the kind of sophisticated language for which I am famous. "Crap crap crap crap crap crap crap stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid crap.”

“C'mon Pudge. I'm teasing. You have to be tough. I didn't know how bad it was-- and I'm sorry, and they'll regret it-- but you have to be tough.”

“Things never happen like I imagined them”

“Yeah, Pudge is adorable / but you want incorrigible / so Jake is more endurable / 'cause he's so - damn. Damn. I almost had four rhymes on adorable. But all I could think of was unfloorable, which isn't even a word." - Takumi”

“Tiny Cooper is splayed out across the thin carpet, using his backpack as a pillow. He’s wearing skinny jeans, which look very much like denim sausage casings.”

“Tiny takes a shot, grimaces, and exhales. “Tastes like Satan’s fire cock,” Tiny says, and then pushes another shot in my direction. “Sounds delightful,” I say, “but I’ll pass.”

“How very odd, to believe God gave you life, and yet not think that life asks more of you than watching TV.”

“This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before. This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that made fish crawl out onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead.”

“My stomach sank. JP had come so close. His immigrant parents had sacrificed so much.”

“Breaking down that wall is the kind of story that might have a happy middle - oh, look, we broke down this wall, I'm going to look at you like a girl and you're going to look at me like a boy, and we're going to play a fun game called Can I Put My Hand There What About There What About There.”

“I don't want to hear another negative word about cheerleaders. If it weren't for cheerleaders, who would tell us when and how to be happy during athletic events? If it weren't for cheerleaders, how would America's prettiest girls get the exercise that's so vital to a healthy life?”

“Don't make fun of her," the Duke said. "She needs gentle encouragement. Carla, baby, we love you. You are such a good car. And we believe in you one hundred percent."..."Don't listen to him, Carla. You're gonna do this."..."I love you, Carla. You know that, don't you? I wake up every morning and the first thing I think is that I love Tobin's mom's car. I know that's weird, baby, but I do. I love you. And I know you can do this."..."Carla," the Duke said, "it's time to tell you the truth. I'm in love with you. I want to be with you, Carla. I've never felt this way about a c-”

“I tore open the closet door and began feverishly sorting through the shirts piled on the floor in the vain hope that inside that pile there might be some wondrously perfect shirt down there, a nice and tough but I'm also a surprisingly good listener with a true and abiding passion for cheers and those who lead them.”

“Tobin," Mom said disapprovingly. She wasn't a particularly funny person. It suited her professionally - I mean, you don't want your cancer surgeon to walk into the examination room and be like, "Guy walks into a bar. Bartender says, 'What'll ya have?' And the guy says, 'Whaddya got?' And the bartender says, 'I don't know what I got, but I know what you got: Stage IV melanoma.”

“I'll just go over to the Duke's," I said. "Her parents already told me I could stay there. I'll go over there and open all my presents, and talk about how my parents neglect me, and then maybe the Duke will give me some of her presents because she feels so bad about how my mom doesn't love me.”

“We acknowledge that being the person God made you cannot separate you from God's love.”

“We fatties have a bond, dude. It's like a secret society. We got all kinds of shit you don't know about. Handshakes, special fat people dances-we got these secret fugging lairs in the center of the earth and we go down there in the middle of the night when all the skinny kids are sleeping and eat cake and friend chicken and shit. Why d'you think Hollis is still sleeping, kafir? Because we were up all night in the secret lair injecting butter frosting into our veins. ...A fatty trusts another fatty.”

“Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I dont want us to forget Alaska, and I don't want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we're trying to und3erstand how people answered that question and the question each of you posed in your papers--how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called 'people's rotten lots in life.”

“But monotony doesn't make for painlessness. In the first century CE, Roman authorities punished St. Appollonia by crushing her teeth one by one with pliers. Colin often thought about this in relationship to the monotony of dumping: we have thirty two teeth. After a while, having each tooth individually destroyed probably gets repetitive, even dull. But it never stops hurting.”

“Abligurition: an actual, if very obscure, English word, which means the spending of too much money on food.”

“I mean, if Hardee's is urban, I'm not sure I want to see rural.”

“Half-drunk on well-creamed gas station coffee and the exhilarating loneliness of a freeway in nighttime...”

“Also, I feel that crying is almost--like, aside from deaths of relatives or whatever-- totally avoidable if you follow two very simple rules: 1.Don't care too much. 2. Shut up. Everything unfortunate that has ever happened to me has stemmed from failure to follow one of the rules.”

“Compromise is when you do what I tell you and I do what I want. ~Tiny Cooper”

“Tiny, the next time that you try to set me up with a girl with a secret boyfriend can you at least INFORM me that she has a secret boyfriend? Also, if you don't call me back within five minutes, I'm going to assume you found a way back to Evanston. Furthermore, you are an asshat. That is all.”

“If you don't say the honest thing, it never becomes true.”