“Use your words”

“Hazel GRACE!” he shouted. “You did not use your one dying Wish to go to Disney World with your parents.”“Also Epcot Center,” I mumbled.“Oh, my God,” Augustus said. “I can’t believe I have a crush on a girl with such cliché wishes.”

“People always get used to beauty, though.”“I haven’t gotten used to you just yet,”

“You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”

“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.”

“Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”

“Reading with an eye towards metaphor allows us to become the person we’re reading about, while reading about them. That’s why there is symbols in books and why your English teacher deserves your attention. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if the author intended the 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 seeing other people as a we ourselves.”