John Green

"I'm in love with you, he said quietly. Augustus, I said. I am, he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you."

"As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once."

"And then the line was quite but not dead. I almost felt like he was there in my room with me, but in a way it was better, like I was not in my room and he was not in his, but instead we were together in some invisible and tenuous third space that could only be visited on the phone."

"Maybe its like you said before, all of us being cracked open. Like each of us starts out as a watertight vessel. And then things happen - these people leave us, or don’t love us, or don’t get us, or we don’t get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack in places. And I mean, yeah once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable. Once it starts to rain inside the Osprey, it will never be remodeled. But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And its only that time that we see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs. 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."

"There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn't."

"There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow- that, in short, we are all going."

"I will not tell you our love story, because—like all real love stories—it will die with us, as it should."

"So dawn goes down today... Nothing gold can stay.-- Robert Frost"

"I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can't due to deadness."

"Because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of."

"I found myself thinking about President William Mc Kinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and towards the end, his wife started crying and screaming, I want to go too! I want to go too! And with his last measure of strength, Mc Kinley turned to her and spoke his last words: We are all going."

"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."

"Sometimes people don’t understandthe promises they’re making when they make them, I said. Isaac shot me a look. Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That’swhat love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don’t you believe in true love?"

"She said, It's not life or death, the labyrinth. Um, okay. 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 the living or dying. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering?... Nothing's wrong. But there's always suffering, Pudge. Homework or malaria or having a boyfriend who lives far away when there's a good-looking boy lying next to you. Suffering is universal. It's the one thing Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims are all worried about."

"I told Augustus the broad outline of my miracle: diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer when I was thirteen. (I didn’t tell him that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You’re a woman. Now die.)"

"As long as we don't die, this is gonna be one hell of a story."

"I figured something out. The future is unpredictable."

"The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That's actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing."

"I was blind and heart broken and didn't want to do anything and Gus burst into my room and shouted, I have wonderful news! And I was like, I don't really want to hear wonderful news right now, and Gus said, This is wonderful news you want to hear, and I asked him, Fine, what is it? and he said, You are going to live a good and long life filled with great and terrible moments that you cannot even imagine yet!"

"Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species."