John Green

“When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.”

“I didn’t need you, you idiot. I picked you. And then you picked me back.”

“I may die young, but at least I'll die smart.”

“Islam and Christianity promise eternal paradise 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 seem 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 of fear of hell, but because He is God.”

“You know your problem, Quentin? You keep expecting people not to be themselves. I mean, I could hate you for being massively unpunctual and for never being interested in anything other than Margo Roth Spiegelman, and for, like, never asking me about how it's going with my girlfriend - but I don't give a shit, man, because you're you. My parents have a shit ton of black Santas, but that's okay. They're them. I'm too obsessed with a reference website to answer my phone sometimes when my friends call, or my girlfriend. That's okay, too. That's me. You like me anyway. And I like you. You're funny, and you're smart, and you may show up late, but you always show up eventually.”

“The pleasure isn't in doing the thing, the pleasure is in planning it.”

“Isn't it also that on some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are? We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.”

“Peeing is like a good book in that it is very, very hard to stop once you start.”

“In the end, I had to call myself a faggot, which really annoyed me, because 1. I don't think that word should ever be used by anyone, let alone me, and 2. As it happens, I am not gay, and furthermore, 3. Chuck Parson made it out like calling yourself a faggot was the ultimate humiliation, even though there's nothing at all embarrassing about being gay.”

“We are all going, I thought, and it applies to turtles and turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.”

“God I love rainbows.”

“I know it doesn't feel this way all the time, but we get to choose what we care about and what we spend our resources on. We choose what - or ideally whom - to lust after. We choose what to watch, what to like, what to build, how to spend the breaths that we've been alive. And the fact that many of our choices are unconscious - get that handbag, get that Starbucks, look at that Snooki - does not in any way make us less responsible for those choices. I'm happiest when I feel like I'm part of a community that helps me choose more intelligently and with greater empathy. And I, for one, like the choices we made this weekend.”

“Once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable. But there is all this time inbetween when the vessel cracks open and we finally fall apart. And its only in that time that we can really see one another, because we see out of ourselves, through the cracks, and into theirs. When did we see each other face to face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other.”

“The Colonel led all the cheers.Cornbread!" he screamed.CHICKEN!" the crowd responded.Rice!"PEAS!"And then, all together: "WE GOT HIGHER SATs."Hip Hip Hip Hooray!" the Colonel cried.YOU'LL BE WORKIN' FOR US SOMEDAY!”

“Comment dis-tu 'Oh my God, I don't know nearly enough French to pass French II' en français?”

“At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid, and it hurts, but then it's over and you're relieved.”

“I still think that maybe the "afterlife" is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe we are just matter, and matter gets recycled”

“Once you think a thought, it is extremely difficult to unthink it.”

“You can say a lot of bad things about Alabama, but you can't say that Alabamans as a people are duly afraid of deep fryers.”

“I never liked writing concluding paragraphs to papers - where you repeat what you've already said with phrases like 'In summation', and 'To conclude'.”

“I didn't know whether to trust Alaska, and I'd certainly had enough of her unpredictability - cold one day, sweet the next; irresistibly flirty one moment, resistibly obnoxious the next. I preferred the Colonel: At least when he was cranky, he had a reason.”

“It was right then, between when I asked about the labyrinth and when she answered me, that I realized the importance of curves, of the thousand places where girls' bodies ease from one place to another, from arc to the foot to ankle to calf, from calf to hip to wait to breast to neck to ski-slope nose to forehead to shoulder to the concave arch of the back to the butt to the etc. I'd noticed curves before, of course, but I had never quite apprehended their significance.”

“We Play the broken string of our instruments one last time”

“A novel is a conversation between a reader and a writer.”

“‎These little contradictions are in all of us. They're in me at least. And so I forgot that I had been awake for 30 hours and kept walking, grateful to be a little boat full of water, still floating.”

“IT IS NOT MY FAULT THAT MY PARENTS OWN THE WORLD'S LARGEST COLLECTION OF BLACK SANTAS.”

“Have you really read all those books in your room?”Alaska laughing- “Oh God no. I’ve maybe read a third of ‘em. But I’m going to read them all. I call it my Life’s Library. Every summer since I was little, I’ve gone to garage sales and bought all the books that looked interesting. So I always have something to read.”

“Adult librarians are like lazy bakers: their patrons want a jelly doughnut, so they give them a jelly doughnut. Children’s librarians are ambitious bakers: 'You like the jelly doughnut? I’ll get you a jelly doughnut. But you should try my cruller, too. My cruller is gonna blow your mind, kid.”

“It doesn’t matter how long we’ve used something; all that matters is how awesome the thing replacing it is. MP3s and automobiles happen to be really, really awesome, whereas ebooks—at least so far—are fairly limited in their awesomeness.”

“I'm not saying that everything is survivable. Just that everything except the last thing is.”

“Traveling, I am finding, teaches you a lot of things about yourself. For instance, I never thought myself to be the kind of person who pees into a mostly empty bottle of Bluefin energy drink while driving through South Carolina at seventy-seven miles per hour - but in face I am that kind of person.”

“Alaska decided to go help Dolores with dinner. She said that it was sexist to leave the cooking to the women, but better to have good sexist food than crappy boy-prepared food.”

“Poetry is just so emo." he said. "Oh, the pain. The pain. It always rains. In my soul.”

“I try to live life so that I can live with myself.”

“I shaved this morning for precisely that reason. I was like, 'Well, you never know when someone is going to clamp down on your calf and try to suck out the snake poison.”

“We're not going to break anything. Don't think of it as breaking in to SeaWorld. Think of it as visiting SeaWorld in the middle of the night for free.”

“What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous.”

“you can never love someone as much as you miss them.”

“The only thing worse than having a party that no one attends is having a party attended only by two vastly, deeply uninteresting people.”

“We didn't talk much. But we didn't need to.”

“Shame about how we’re gonna die here, though. I mean, seriously. An Araband a half-Jew enter a store in Tennessee. It’s the beginning of a joke, and the punch line is “sodomy’’.”

“It's not about life or death, the labyrinth.""So what is it?""Suffering." she said. "Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That's the problem. Bolivar was talking about the pain, not about living or dying. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?”

“I stand in this parking lot, realizing that I’ve never been this far from home, and here is this girl I love and cannot follow. I hope this is the hero’s errand, because not following her is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

“The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of a sentence.”

“He just waited until I stopped talking and said, 'Jesus, kid, you're almost a detective. All you need now is a gun, a gut, and three ex-wives. So what's your theory?”

“High school is neither a democracy nor a dictatorship - nor, contrary to popular belief, an anarchic state. High school is a divine-right monarchy. And when the queen goes on vacation, things change.”

“I'd had nearly four years of experience looking at these clocks, but their sluggishness never ceased to surprise. If I am ever told that I have one day to live, I will head straight to the hallowed halls of Winter Park High School, where a day has been known to last a thousand years.”

“That's always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people want to be around someone because they're pretty. It's like picking your breakfeast cereals based on color instead of taste.”

“Tonight, darling, we are going to right a lot of wrongs. And we are going to wrong some rights. The first shall be last; the last shall be first; the meek shall do some earth-inheriting. But before we can radically reshape the world, we need to shop.”

“There is no Them. There are only facets of Us.”