“I've never known before what it feels like to want someone - not to want to hook up with them or whatever, but to want them, to want them. And now I do. So maybe I do believe in epiphanies.”

“I didn't want to look at them, so I looked away, and to look away was to look at Augustus.”

“But you want to see shapes; you want to see stories, so you pick them out of the sky.”

“If I become blind and 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.”

“If we'd put them in a vase in the living room, they would have been everyone's flowers. I wanted them to be my flowers.”

“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.”

“My days had a pleasant identicalness about them. I had always liked that: I liked routine. I liked being bored. I didn’t want to but I did.”