John Green

“all I have to do is stay in between the lines and make sure that no one is too close to me and I am not too close to anyone and keep leaving. Maybe it felt like this for her, too, but I could never feel like this alone.”

“The thing is that I do believe in college, and jobs, and maybe even babies one day. I believe in the future. Maybe it's a character flaw, but for me it is a congenital one.”

“To find Margo Roth Spiegelman, you must become Margo Roth Spiegelman. And I had done many of the things she might have done: I had engineered a most unlikely prom coupling. I had quieted the hounds of caste warfare. I had come to feel comfortable inside the rat-infested haunted house where she did her best thinking. I had seen. I had listened. But I could not yet become the wounded person.”

“Bro, it's dark. You can't go to a strange building with a mysterious address in the dark. Haven't you ever seen a horror movie?”

“Yeah, people keep saying my other senses will improve to compensate, but CLEARLY NOT YET. Hi, Support Group Hazel. Come over here so I can examine your face with my hands and see deeper into your soul than a sighted person ever could.”

“You know how we make a Scotch and water in this home?""No, sir," Gus said."We pour Scotch into a glass and then call to mind thoughts of water, and then we mix the actual Scotch with the abstracted idea of water.”

“Tell me my copy is missing the last twenty pages or something.Hazel Grace, tell me I have not reached the end of this book.OH MY GOD DO THEY GET MARRIED OR NOT OH MY GOD WHAT IS THIS?!”

“And I don't really have anyone upon whom I want to rain down my wrath," I said, because in truth I didn't. I always felt like you had to be important to have enemies. Example: Historically, Germany has had more enemies than Luxembourg, Margo Roth Spiegelman was Germany. And Great Britain. And the United States. And czarist Russia. Me, I'm Luxembourg. Just sitting around, tending sheep, and yodeling.”

“the existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate”

“Some mysteries aren't meant to be solved.”

“You may be smart, but I've been smart longer.”

“Polvo eres y en polvo te convertirás. De una venta de garaje saliste y a otra venta de garaje regresas.”

“Me: "it does not taste like God Himself cooked heaven into a series of five dishes which were then served to you accompanied by several luminous balls of fermented, bubbly plasma while actual and literal flower petals floated down all around you canal-siide dinner table."Gus: "Nicely phrased"Gus's father: Our children are weird."My dad: "Nicely phrased”

“Like, in general I think people have very complicated reasons for wanting things, and we often have no idea whether we’re actually motivated by altruism or a desire to hook up or a search for answers or what. I always get annoyed when in books or movies characters want clear things for clear reasons, because my experience of humanness is that I always want messy things for messy reasons.”

“Colin thought about the dork mantra: sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. What a dirty lie.”

“I love you present tense.”

“I learned that myth doesn’t mean a lie; it means a traditional story that tells you something about people and their worldview and what they hold sacred. Interesting.”

“I thought it might be a fine time to say the Three Little Words. And I steeled myself to say them as I stared up at that starriest night, convinced myself that she felt it, too, that her hand so alive and vivid against my leg was more than playful, and fuck Lara and fuck Jake because I do, Alaska Young, I do love you and what else matters but that and my lips parted to speak and before I could even begin to breathe out the words, she said, “It’s not life or death, the labyrinth.”

“And I don’t blame him. I don’t even trust me.”

“I’m on a side of a road somewhere, stuck in the middle of a very deep hole, with no way of getting out. Never mind how I got in there, it’s not relevant to the story. I’ll invent a back-story… I was walking to get pizza and a chasm opened up in the earth and I fell in, and now I’m at the bottom of this hole, screaming for help. And along comes you. Now, maybe you just keep walking. You know, there’s a strange guy screaming from the center of the Earth. It’s perhaps best to just ignore him. But let’s say that you don’t. Let’s say that you stop. The sensible thing to do in this situation is to call down to me and say “I’m going to look for a ladder. I will be right back.” But you don’t do that. Instead you sit down at the edge of this abyss, and then you push yourself forward, and jump. And when you land at the bottom of the hole and dust yourself off, I’m like “What the hell are you doing?! Now there are two of us in this hole!” And you look at me and say, “Well yeah, but now I’m highly motivated to get you out.” This is what I love about novels, both reading them and writing them. They jump into the abyss to be with you where you are”

“I'm not going to be one of those people who sits around talking about what they're going to do. I'm just going to do it. Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.”

“In the end, what makes a book valuable is not the paper it’s printed on, but the thousands of hours of work by dozens of people who are dedicated to creating the best possible reading experience for you.”

“my mom and dad came into my room, and even though it was really not big enough for all three of us, they lay on either side of the bed with me and we all watched ANTM on the little TV in my room.”

“I just want to be enough for you, but I never can be. This can never be enough for you. But this is all you get. You get me, and your family, and this world. This is your life. I'm sorry if it sucks. But you're not going to be the first man on Mars and you're not going to be an NBA star, and you're not going to hunt Nazis.”

“I don't care if the New York Times writes an obituary for me. I just want you to write one. ... You say you're not special because the world doesn't know about you, but that's an insult to me. I know about you.”

“But it's not a cancer book, because cancer books suck.”

“I’ve stopped thinking about it. I don’t have time to have a girlfriend. I have like a full-time job Learning How to Be Blind.”

“I pulled the oxygen tubes from my nostrils and raised the tube up over my head, handing it to Dad. I wanted it to be just me and just him.”

“I kind of conned you into believing you were falling in love with a healthy person.”

“Thank you for wearing that dress which is like whoa.”

“Indiana,’ he said. ‘They steal the land from the Indians and leave the name, yes?”

“I want to minimize the deaths I am responsible for.”

“Girls think they’re only allowed to wear dresses on formal occasions, but I like a woman who says, you know, I’m going over to see a boy who is having a nervous breakdown, a boy whose connection to the sense of sight itself is tenuous, and gosh dang it, I am going to wear a dress for him.”

“I get it now. I get it. The things you hope for the most are the things that destroy you in the end.”

“But then again, if you don't imagine, nothing ever happens at all.”

“Maybe life is not about accomplishing some bullshit markers.”

“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.”

“In the ensuing silence, I have time to contemplate the word cute— how dismissive it is, how it’s the equivalent of calling someone little, how it makes a person into a baby, how the word is a neon sign burning through the dark reading, “Feel Bad About Yourself.”

“Pudge," She shook her head and sipped the cold coffee and wine-"Pudge, what you must understand about me is that I am a deeply unhappy person.”

“I just want you to be happy. If that’s with me or with someone else or with nobody. I just want you to be happy.”

“So of course I tensed up when he touched me. To be with him was to hurt him- inevitably. And that's what I'd felt as he reached for me: I'd felt as though I were committing an act of violence against him, because I was.”

“The things that hurt us are often the things that help us, and the whole dichotomy between creation and destruction is totally false, I think. We live in a universe that seems committed to making and unmaking all that is possible, you know?”

“and (b) Kissing someone so that you can get a free trip is perilously close to full-on hooking”

“Losing your co-remember meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hours before”

“We Hoosiers are excessively optimistic about summer.”

“Brainy. Definitely the new Sexy.”

“God we must look so lame, but it doesn't much matter when you have just now realized, all the time later, that you are still alive.”

“She didn't leave me enough to discover her, but she left me enough to rediscover the Great Perhaps.”

“I didn't know whether to feel angry at her for making me part of her suicide or just to feel angry at myself for letting her go.”

“There's no way of knowing that your last good day is Your Last Good Day. At the time, it is just another good day.”