“The vast majority of us imagine ourselves as like literature people or math people. But the truth is that the massive processor known as the human brain is neither a literature organ or a math organ. It is both and more.”

“As far as all of our identities are dependent on how other people imagine us we are all making ourselves and each other up all the time”

“There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it.”

“There was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that’s one in five . . . so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.”

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

“I did some research on this a couple years ago," Augustus continued. "I was wondering if everybody could be remembered. Like, if we got organized, and assigned a certain number of corpses to each living person, would there be enough living people to remember all the dead people?""And are there?" "Sure, anyone can name fourteen dead people. But we're disorganized mourners, so a lot of people end up remembering Shakespeare and no one ends up remembering the person he wrote Sonnet Fifty-five about”

“JG: Ha! I will get him Looking for Alaska and tell him this idea that a human being is more than a human being is a mistaken idea and in the end does no service either to him or the person he's imagining. That trope has become so deeply embedded in American culture, and as someone who writes about young people falling in love, I feel like I can't ignore it, but I try to make it clear that life works best when we think of people as people.”